Today for me has been a day of change, I decided that my current development environment was holding me back so I decided to look at updating my development stack.

The first thing I decided to do was to ditch Macports in favour of Homebrew.

I’d been using macports for the last year or so and whilst i was generally happy with it, I’d started using Homebrew at work and I liked the much simpler way of install packages and the less reliance on running things using ‘sudo’.

The first thing I did was to completely remove Macports, since I’d only been using this for PHP/MySQL it was pretty easy

1

sudo port -f uninstall installed

I then went through and removed any traces of Macports

1
2
3
4
5
6

sudo rm -rf /opt/local
sudo rm -rf /Applications/MacPorts
sudo rm -rf /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.*
sudo rm -rf /Library/Receipts/MacPorts*.pkg
sudo rm -rf /Library/Tcl/macports1.0
sudo rm -rf ~/.macports

I was now ready to install Homebrew which can be done using a simple command

1

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/go)"

Once it was complete I just checked that everything was okay using

1

brew doctor

I had to modify my bash profile to make sure that /usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin was at the start of my search path but other than that just seemed to work out of the box.

Next up was to add some forumula’s because I wanted to move from PHP 5.3 to PHP 5.4 (I might even go to 5.5 yet)

1
2
3

brew tap josegonzalez/php
brew tap homebrew/dupes
brew install php54 --with-mysql php54-xdebug php54-intl composer

I am using the built-in apache from OSX as brew doesn’t distribute a version since its available already with most operating systems.

Now all I need is a copy of node.js for my various projects

1

brew install node

And I’m ready to get up and running with my development again.

Not bad for a couple of hours effort.