macos - Installing mcrypt extension for PHP on OSX Mountain Lion

Question

Apologies in advance for the potential n00b questions, I am trying to install the mcrypt extension for PHP on my OSX Mountain Lion machine.

The following steps in terminal is what I have done so far to achieve my PHP install

cd /path/to/downloaded/php-5.3.21/ext/mcrypt/
/usr/bin/phpize
./configure
cd /path/to/downloaded/php-5.3.21
./configure --with-config-file-path=/private/etc/php.ini --with-apxs2=/usr/sbin/apxs
make
sudo make install

Which seems to work well and installs PHP 5.3.21 fine. I have then done

sudo nano /private/etc/php.ini

And included

extension=mcrypt.so

Along with an Apache restart, phpinfo() doesn't show that the mcrypt extension is loaded.

I then tried to specify the extension_dir inside php.ini, again with no luck.

I have done

locate mcrypt.so
/opt/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20090626/mcrypt.so
/usr/local/Cellar/php53-mcrypt/5.3.18/mcrypt.so

And tried both directories as the extension_dir, with no luck.

I have also tried the following, after much Googling

./configure --with-config-file-path=/private/etc/php.ini --with-apxs2=/usr/sbin/apxs --with-mcrypt

Which seems to work OK, but then upon "make", it returns

ext/mcrypt/mcrypt.o: No such file or directory
ext/mcrypt/mcrypt_filter.o: No such file or directory

Again, no success.

What am I doing wrong? It seems like the physical compile of mcrypt.so is not happening, or is compiling incorrectly as I would suspect there to be another mcrypt.so found under locate?

Anyone please help? I've gone through pages upon pages of Google searches with no luck!

Answer 1

I tend to use Homebrew on Mac. It will install and configure all the stuff for you.
http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/

Then you should be able to install it with brew install mcrypt php53-mcrypt and it'll Just Work (tm).

You can replace the 53 with whatever version of PHP you're using, such as php56-mcrypt or php70-mcrypt. If you're not sure, use brew search php.

Do also remember that if you are using the built in Mac PHP it's installed into /usr/bin you can see which php you are using with which php at the terminal and it'll return the path.