Jason McCreary has posted an update to his guide for installing PHP on Mac OS X and replacing the version of PHP that comes with El Capitan (5.5) with a handy package manager more specific to PHP installations.

As noted in my posts on Installing Apache, PHP and MySQL on Mac OS X, OS X comes pre-installed with Apache and PHP. Unfortunately, as of Mac OS X 10.11 (El Capitan) the pre-installed version of PHP is still 5.5. As PHP 5.5 has reached end of life, I imagine the pre-installed version of PHP will be updated with Mac OS 10.12 (Sierra). However, it may only be PHP 5.6.

So what do you do if you want to upgrade or install a different PHP version on your Mac? Well, you could use Homebrew. But I found a pre-packaged alternative - PHP OSX.

With this package manager, the installation is only a few steps but he lists them out with a bit more detail to help you understand what's happening:

• Installing PHP (your choice of version)
• Configuring Apache (loading the php5 shared module)
• Updating your PATH
• Configuring PHP