MacOS – Uninstall default PHP on El Capitan

macosPHP

My Mac has the default installation of PHP 5.5 at /usr/bin/php and I want to remove it the right way because I want to have PHP 7 instead of this. So far no luck on how to uninstall the right way. I can't simply rm -rf /usr/bin/php because there's a lot of other components like php-cli, php-fpm, etc to be removed as well as apache and mysql.

Best Answer

In my opinion, the right way is to set your path to prefer your installation of PHP.

Apple restricts PHP so you can't delete it without bypassing the system integrity protection
Apple will update those files any time it pleases, so you're always needing to re-do whatever steps you take to modify the system
If you make a virtual environment like docker or just using correct paths to your installation, those are portable and don't need any sort of extra work.

If you really need to delete those files, you would boot to recovery HD and disable SIP. Then delete all files and associated libraries (with the potential to break Apple tools if you delete something the system actually runs at some point) and then re-enable SIP as desired. I would make a good backup before changing SIP just in case you wish to recover the system after deleting things.

Related Solutions

When will PHP 5.4 appear in default OS X installations

To be honest, nobody here has a crystal ball connected to the open source adoption strategy team at Cupertino. If you want to do the historical research yourself, you can have a look at Apple Open Source which includes all the open source packages in OS X since 10.0.

How to uninstall PHP 5.4 and 5.5

I'm assuming that the deployment/install script was put at /usr/local/packager/packager.py when it was installed. Apparently, you can use this script to list the packages that are installed:

/usr/local/packager/packager.py list

Unfortunately, the script that you used to install PHP doesn't appear to have an uninstall feature. However, you should be able to remove the installed content that was installed from /usr/local. It is probably a good idea to examine the contents of the /usr/local directory first to confirm the contents:

ls -al /usr/local

From what I can see, the script is installing the software with prefixes like "php5-*", and is linking to the 'current' version of that software using a symbolic link named "php5". The commands below will unlink the symlink, and remove the installed versions of PHP that were installed using the script mentioned above:

sudo unlink /usr/local/php5
sudo rm -rf /usr/local/php5-*

To remove the supplemental configuration file that was installed with the updated PHP software, you may be able to remove the config file at /etc/apache2/other/+php-osx.conf:

sudo rm -rf /etc/apache2/other/+php-osx.conf

Then restart Apache:

sudo apachectl restart

Note: the /usr/local folder shouldn't have much inside of it unless you've installed 3rd party software there. You may find a few PHP installs there that have names like "php5-5.3.x...", "php5-5.4.x...", and "php5-5.5.x...". The rm command above should remove any variants of this naming scheme. Removing the additional Apache configuration file should allow Apache to start normally after the module has been removed.

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Related Solutions

When will PHP 5.4 appear in default OS X installations

How to uninstall PHP 5.4 and 5.5

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