How to change PHP version on MAMP – Mac OSX

It’s very often that you want to change the PHP version in order to install different softwares in your development environment. But the MAMP version in your system comes with pre-installed version of PHP, and you want to go with it.

But this tutorial is explaining how to change php version in MAMP. Follow the steps.

1. Open this file in your favourite text editor /Applications/MAMP/conf/apache/httpd.conf
   Search for and comment the followiing line – LoadModule php7_module.
   It could be LoadModule php5_module, depending on your version.
2. At the bottom of the httpd.conf file, you’ll see where additional configurations are loaded from the extra folder. Add this to the bottom of the httpd.conf file

   Include /Applications/MAMP/conf/apache/extra/httpd-php-extra.conf

3. Create a file called httpd-php-extra.conf in the in the extra folder as we declared in the previous file. And add the below configurations to the file

   LoadModule php7_module /Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php7.3.9/modules/libphp7.so

   You can get available PHP versions in this folder – /Applications/MAMP/bin/php

It’s not finished yet, next we can check how to change the PHP version when accessing via CLI in MAMP.

1. Next, change the PHP version in Cli in MAMP
   Open your Terminal / Commandline and type in

   sudo nano ~/.bashrc

2. Add the following line (change the path as needed):

   alias php="/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php7.3.9/bin/php"

3. Save the fille
4. Run the below command

   source ~/.bashrc

5. All set, test it out

Hope you’ve enjoyed the tutorial, let others know as well.