Manage PHP Versions with Homebrew on macOS

I mostly work with Docker, but sometimes it's useful to have PHP installed locally for some CLI action. To install a specific PHP Version I'm using Homebrew for macOS. Mac provides a preinstalled PHP Version, but this is mostly outdated.

To install the latest PHP Version you can run the following command:

brew install php

It's also possible to install older versions like this:

brew install php@7.4

Homebrew does only maintain not depcrecatd versions. If you have to use a deprecated version for some reason you can do the following:

brew tap exolnet/homebrew-deprecated

brew install php@5.6

If you need to switch between PHP versions you have to first unlink the currently linked PHP version and link the desired one:

brew unlink php

brew link php@7.4 --force --overwrite

This is not the most efficient handling of switching versions compared to Node Version Manager or rbenv for Ruby, but should be sufficient as this probably won't happen too much.