Change the default Mac OS X PHP to MAMP's PHP installation and install Composer package management

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Instructions for changing PHP installation

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First, let's find out what version of PHP we're running (to know if it's the default version).

To do this, trigger this command within the terminal:

which php

This should output the Mac OS X pre-installed default PHP installation path, which by default must be (assuming you haven't changed it before):

/usr/bin/php

Now we just need to swap it to the PHP installed with MAMP, which is located at/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.4.10/bin(MAMP 2.1.1) 3)

To do this, we need to edit.bash_profileand add the MAMP version of PHP to the PATH variable.

Please follow these simple steps:

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1. In the terminal, runvim ~/.bash_profile

2. Typeiand paste the following at the top of the file:

   export PATH=/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.4.10/bin:$PATH

3. PressESC, enter:wq, then pressEnter

4. In the terminal, runsource ~/.bash_profile

5. In the terminal, typewhich phpagain and look for the updated string. If everything was successful, it should output the new path to the MAMP PHP installation.

6. If it doesn't output the correct path, try closing the terminal window (quit completely) and opening it again and it should apply the changes (restart for short).

Install Composer Package Management

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Now you can trigger the command to install composer globally (so you can access it from anywhere):

$ curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php -- --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer

You can verify that the installation works by typing the following command in the terminal:

composer

It will show you the current version and a list of commands you can use after successful installation.

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