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DHIL Documentation
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PHP

Mac OS X includes a version of PHP which is often out of date. Luckily Homebrew makes installing another PHP very easy.

Installation

The DHIL production server runs PHP 7, so we will install that. installing other versions of PHP is possible and quite easy. See below for more information.

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$ brew install php@7.4 pkg-config imagemagick composer yarn php-cs-fixer
$ pecl install imagick

Line 1 installs PHP and friends. The install command will print a lot of information to the terminal which you can mostly ignore. It will also install a PHP package manager called pecl which we will use in step 2.

Line 2 installs the PHP extension that uses imagemagick. It uses PHP’s package manager to download and configure it. The command will ask for a path to the imagemagick library. Press enter to accept the default (autodetect) which should find the library.

Configuring

The instructions below assume you have installed homebrew in /usr/local, which is the default on Intel Mac computers. On newer M1-Macs, homebrew is installed in /opt/homebrew. It is also possible to install homebrew in other locations. To check where your homebrew is, run this command in the terminal:

$ brew --prefix
/usr/local

If the output is not /usr/local, you will need to adjust the instructions below to match your installation.

The pecl install step (line 4 above) will automatically configure PHP to find the imagick extension. Other configuration options are available in /usr/local/etc/php/7.4/php.ini

You must set the timezone in the php.ini file. Open the file in your text editor, and find the [Date] section.

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[Date]
; Defines the default timezone used by the date functions
; http://php.net/date.timezone
;date.timezone =

Uncomment line 4 by removing the semicolon at the start of the line, then add “America/Vancouver” to the end. The result should be

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[Date]
; Defines the default timezone used by the date functions
; http://php.net/date.timezone
date.timezone = America/Vancouver

Other recommended settings are:

  • memory_limit = 128M Change this to 256M or higher.
  • html_errors = On Change this to Off.
  • post_max_size = 8M Change this to 64M or higher.
  • upload_max_filesize = 2M Change this to 60M or higher. It should be less than the value of post_max_size.

Test PHP

PHP includes a few command line tools. These sample commands should all work and print useful things. If you try these commands and get an error message, something has gone wrong in the installation.

PHP 7.4.23 (cli) (built: Aug 27 2021 09:18:37) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.4.0, Copyright (c) Zend Technologies
    with Zend OPcache v7.4.23, Copyright (c), by Zend Technologies

[14:02:03][michael@sophie devenv]$ php -m
[PHP Modules]
bcmath
bz2
calendar
Core
(and many many more)