As you may have read on this blog, we (together with local.ch) provide a ready-to-run compiled PHP package for OS X (Snow Leopard and Lion) for easy installation over at php-osx.liip.ch.

And since the first beta of the next major release of PHP was released a few days ago, I thought we could provide packages for people who'd like to test it and see if there software is still running. And make adjustments or report bugs, if it doesn't. Complaining after the official stable release was made is usually too late, so testing your software against beta releases is very important. For your project and for PHP.

Installation is almost as easy as for the stable release. If you didn't install php-osx before, either install the stable release with

curl -s http://php-osx.liip.ch/install.sh | bash -

or just the installer with

curl -s -o /tmp/packager.tgz http://php-osx.liip.ch/packager/packager.tgz
sudo tar -C /usr/local  -xzf /tmp/packager.tgz

then just do

sudo /usr/local/packager/packager.py install beta-frontenddev

and you're ready to go.

If you want to revert back to the stable PHP, just change the symlink of /usr/local/php5 to some older installation

We will regularly update that package so that it contains the latest bug fixes of the PHP 5.4 branch

Bugs about PHP should be reported at bugs.php.net, bugs or feature request about the php-osx package can be filed at github.com/liip/php-osx/issues. Pull Requests are of course also welcome.

Happy Testing!