Rob Allen has posted some notes to his site helping you get PHP set up on OSX Lion (10.8) successfully.

With OS X 10.8, Apple continues to ship PHP 5.3 with Xdebug, PEAR, GD and PDO_MYSQL. This is how to set it up from a clean install of 10.8.

He's broken it up into a few sections including the MySQL setup, Apache configuration , updating the main php.ini and setting up PHPUnit ("and friends") for your testing. He also includes setup instructions for the mcrypt and the PECL OAuth extensions.

Bertrand Mansion has a recent post to his blog looking at repairing missing functionality in the latest OS X update (Lion) with the intl extension and gettext (not installed by default).

Mac OSX Lion ships with PHP 5.3.6. [...] These are all very good solutions, but since I prefer to travel light and the version in Lion already comes with a lot of useful extensions, I preferred to go with it.

He shows how to update the default Lion PHP install to include some of the things he needed for his development including:

• setting up the php.ini file
• installing PEAR/PECL
• installing the intl extension
• and a hack to get gettext working (renaming a base function)

Rob Allen has posted his own guide to getting PHP 5.3 set up on OS X 10.7 Lion, the just-released update for Apple's operating system. It comes with a bundled set of PHP-related tools but you might want to set them up your own way. This is where the guide comes in.

With OS X 10.7, Apple continues to ship PHP 5.3 with PEAR, GD and PDO_MYSQL out of the box. This is how to set it up from a clean install of 10.7.

He goes through each of the pieces of software and talks about where to download the latest from and what configuration steps are needed:

• MySQL
• Apache
• the php.ini
• Xdebug
• PEAR
• PHPUnit (and friends)
• PECL OAuth
• mcrypt

Alex Simonenko has a new post to his blog talking about what he had to do to get PHP 5.3.6 working on his OS X Lion installation since a previous method no longer worked. in his new post he shares his solution - using Homebrew. (Note: original post is in Russian)

After installing OS X Lion (10.7) was faced with an unpleasant problem, install PHP + MySQL bundle as I did before does not work. And as it turned out, the problem is in MySQL, source code is not yet ready for the new OS from Apple. After some thought and reading similar problems on the Internet, I found [a solution to the problem].

He includes the commands you'll need to get Homebrew installed and configured to install a fresh download of the archive (dmg) after a few setup changes. He uses Homebrew to install a few dependencies the installation will need and his example configure options for the build. Then the install is just a "make" and "make install" away.