Installing PHP locally

Which version to chose?

We encourage to use a stable PHP release with active support. Currently this is PHP 8.1, 8.2 and 8.3. Details on current releases and their timelines can be found in the official PHP documentation.

Install PHP

Most package managers for Linux / macOS provide pre-built packages. PHP can be downloaded and built from source, available at php.net/downloads.php or windows.php.net/download.

Linux

Different distributions have different methods. You should be able to

yum install php

or

apt-get install php

depending on your package manager.

For further instructions, read the PHP manual on Installation on Unix systems.

macOS

While PHP is often bundled with macOS, it is often outdated. We recommended installing PHP through Homebrew. You can install Homebrew following the instructions here.

To confirm its installation try the following command, it should output Homebrew 4.2.x at the time of this writing.

brew --version 

Install PHP via homebrew

brew install php@8.3

This should display the now installed version of PHP, at least version 8.1.0.

php -v

For further instructions, read the manual on Installation on macOS.

Windows

Official PHP binaries for Windows can be downloaded from windows.php.net/download.

There are pre-built stacks including WAMP - (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and XAMPP.

For further instructions, read the manual on Installation on Windows systems.

Docker

If you prefer containerized solutions, you can download official PHP image from Docker Hub. You will also need Docker.

Other

If you want to use a different OS, see instruction on php.net/manual/en/install.

Install Composer

Install Composer following your devices OS installation instructions. We recommend installing it globally for ease of use.

Install PHPUnit

Via PHP Archive (PHAR)

The easiest way to use PHPUnit for Exercism exercises is downloading a distribution that is packaged as a PHP Archive (PHAR), which is also the recommended way to use PHPUnit. Store the PHAR where you stored the exercism CLI to run PHPUnit from wherever you are.

You can download a release of PHPUnit packages as a PHP archive:

wget -O phpunit.phar https://phar.phpunit.de/phpunit-10.phar

Then make the downloaded file executable:

chmod +x phpunit.phar

And move it to the same location as you moved the exercism CLI, naming the command phpunit:

mv phpunit.phar ~/bin/phpunit

Now you can run phpunit from wherever you are, as shown in the PHP track testing docs:

phpunit --version

The output should look like this:

PHPUnit 10.5.45 by Sebastian Bergmann and contributors.

You can also follow the official Installing PHPUnit instructions to install PHPUnit.

Via Composer

PHPUnit version 10 can also be installed globally via Composer, using the following command:

composer global require phpunit/phpunit ^10.5

Please make sure you install version 10.5 or later.