Install PHP Mcrypt Extension in OS X

This is verified to work in Yosemite but should work at least in Mavericks if not older as well. Let me know if issues should arise.

These directions are for working with the native installation of PHP. Your results may vary if you are using a brew or otherwise installed version of PHP.

We meed install the required dependencies. If you are not already using Homebrew you will need it.

$ brew install autoconf pkg-config libmcrypt

You will also want to make sure you have PEAR installed; instructions can be found here but can be summarized as follows:

$ wget http://pear.php.net/go-pear.phar
$ php go-pear.phar

Next we will download the PHP source. Verify the exact version of PHP you are running.

$ php --version

This should output something along the lines of the following. The version is highlighted.

PHP 5.5.14 (cli) (built: Sep  9 2014 19:09:25) 
Copyright (c) 1997-2014 The PHP Group

Now we move into a working directory and download the source making sure to update the following for the version from above.

$ cd /tmp
$ mkdir memcached
$ curl -L http://php.net/get/php-{{version}}.tar.bz2/from/this/mirror > php.tar.bz2
$ open php.tar.bz2

Now we will compile and test the Mcrypt extension.

$ cd php-{{version}}/ext/mcrypt
$ phpize
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make test
$ sudo make install

If all that goes well finally we'll need to add the following to our php.ini - I usually add at it at the end of the file.

extension = mcrypt.so

You can verify your installation with the following:

$ php --info | grep mcrypt\\.

Lastly, depending on your setup now you may want to restart apache.

$ sudo apachectl restart