The following is a rapid installation of PHP 5.5 on OS X 10.8. This compiles 5.5 from source, including two required libraries and finding the appropriate configure command. If you are comfortable at the command line, and especially if you are comfortable compiling your own binaries, then this should take no more than 30 minutes, with the majority being the actual PHP compilation.

Let's jump right in. Here's an overview of the steps:

Back-up existing binaries Install jpeg and png libs Download PHP source Adjust Apple's ./configure command Build & install

1. Back up existing PHP binaries

php -i > ~/php-config-2013-08-15 sudo cp /usr/libexec/apache2/libphp5.so ~/libphp5.so.apple sudo cp /usr/bin/php ~/php.apple

2. Install JPEG and PNG libs

To compile php 5.5, you'll need development libs for JPEG and PNG compression. Download and configure/make/install the following:

3. Download PHP 5.5 Source

Get the latest 5.5 code from here.

4. Adjust the Previous OS X ./configure command for PHP 5.3 (or 5.4)

For a great starting point on your configure command, run the following:

php -i |grep configure

This is the ./configure command that Apple used to compile your installed PHP. With just a few adjustments we can whip this into shape. I'll leave the details discovery to you and show you my resulting ./configure command. Naturally, you'll need to change your working directory to be the expanded source code you just downloaded.

./configure --prefix=/usr --mandir=/usr/share/man --infodir=/usr/share/info --sysconfdir=/private/etc --with-apxs2=/usr/sbin/apxs --enable-cli --with-config-file-path=/etc --with-libxml-dir=/usr --with-openssl=/usr --with-kerberos=/usr --with-zlib=/usr --enable-bcmath --with-bz2=/usr --enable-calendar --disable-cgi --with-curl=/usr --enable-dba --enable-exif --enable-fpm --enable-ftp --with-gd --with-freetype-dir=/usr/X11R6 --with-jpeg-dir=/usr/local --with-png-dir=/usr/local --enable-gd-native-ttf --with-icu-dir=/usr --with-iodbc=/usr --with-ldap=/usr --with-ldap-sasl=/usr --with-libedit=/usr --enable-mbstring --enable-mbregex --with-mysql=mysqlnd --with-mysqli=mysqlnd --without-pear --with-pdo-mysql=mysqlnd --with-mysql-sock=/var/mysql/mysql.sock --with-readline=/usr --enable-shmop --with-snmp=/usr --enable-soap --enable-sockets --enable-sysvmsg --enable-sysvsem --enable-sysvshm --with-tidy --enable-wddx --with-xmlrpc --with-iconv-dir=/usr --with-xsl=/usr --enable-zip --with-pcre-regex --with-pgsql=/usr --with-pdo-pgsql=/usr

5. Build and Install

This is where I must tell you that you must take full responsibility for your own system. If you do not understand the inherent risks involved in what you are doing (if you aren't adequately eye-brow-raised at any online resource that tells you to 'sudo make install'), then please find a different way (MAMP?) to update your development environment.

After running your ./configure command, and knowing that you have your binary apache .so and php backed up, it's time to build PHP 5.5 and install it:

make sudo make install

Summary

Let me show you a hypothetical single-script for all of this. I have not tested this, so use with care. For that reason, I have not included the install step.