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Get Up and Running with PHP on macOS ​

This guide will get you a fully working PHP development environment (including Composer and Tina4) on your Mac in just a few minutes using Homebrew – the de facto standard package manager for macOS.

1. Install Homebrew (if you don’t have it already) ​

Open Terminal and run:

bash
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Follow the on-screen instructions (you may need to enter your password).

2. Install PHP ​

bash
brew update
brew install php

This installs the latest stable PHP version (currently PHP 8.3+ as of 2025) with all common extensions enabled.

Verify it works:

bash
php -v

You should see something like:

PHP 8.3.x (cli) (built: ...) ...

3. Install Composer (PHP dependency manager) ​

bash
php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');"

# Verify the installer (official SHA-384 hash – always up-to-date at https://composer.github.io/installer.sig)
php -r "if (hash_file('sha384', 'composer-setup.php') === trim(file_get_contents('https://composer.github.io/installer.sig'))) { echo 'Installer verified'.PHP_EOL; } else { echo 'Installer corrupt'.PHP_EOL; unlink('composer-setup.php'); exit(1); }"

php composer-setup.php --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer

# Clean up
php -r "unlink('composer-setup.php');"

Now test Composer:

bash
composer --version

You should see:

Composer version 2.x.x 2025-xx-xx ...

4. Optional: Make PHP & Composer available in all new terminals ​

Homebrew usually does this automatically, but if needed, add these lines to your shell profile (~/.zshrc for zsh, ~/.bash_profile for bash):

bash
export PATH="/opt/homebrew/opt/php/bin:$PATH"
export PATH="/opt/homebrew/opt/php/sbin:$PATH"
export PATH="$HOME/.composer/vendor/bin:$PATH"

Then reload:

bash
source ~/.zshrc   # or source ~/.bash_profile

You're ready! ​

You now have a clean, modern PHP environment and can start using Tina4 immediately:

bash
composer create-project tina4stack/tina4-php my-project
cd my-project
composer start

Open http://localhost:7145 in your browser – welcome to Tina4! 🚀