Using Drush in a MAMP environment

Drush is a very powerful instrument in the toolbox of a Drupal developer. But it can give you a little headache when trying to install in your local MAMP setup. Also because I had forgotten how to do it within my fresh installation of MAMP Pro, a quick and relatively simple tutorial on how to install Drush.

Make MAMP's PHP binary the default one

When you install MAMP on your Mac, there are two PHP versions installed on your machine. Mac ships with a default Apache/PHP setup and will be the one that is used by default. You need to tell the command-line to use the MAMP's PHP rather than the one that ships by default with your Mac.

You'll do that by overriding the path variable. Type the following in the terminal; echo $PATH The output of the Terminal should be similar to this: /sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11/bin

MAMP Pro comes with two versions of PHP; 5.2.17 and 5.3.6. We will make version 5.3.6 the default one in our terminal. To override the PATH variable, you need to edit the ~/.bash_profile file and add our PATH variable to it. Type the following in the terminal to edit this file: sudo vi ~/.bash_profile This will open the VIM editor and lets you edit the file. Make sure the following line exists and otherwise enter it: PATH=/Applications/MAMP/Library/bin:/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3.6/bin:$PATH With this line, we tell the system to use the PHP binary in the 5.3.6 folder, before any other existing PHP binaries on the system.

When you now run which php in the Terminal, you'll see something similar to the following and we can continue installing Drush; /Applications/MAMP/Library/bin

Installing Drush through PEAR

MAMP's PEAR comes with a conf file which causes weird issues. Luckily I had used PEAR earlier and fixed this by running the following command: rm /Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3.6/conf/pear.conf

Now you have to make sure that you've installed the console_getopt PEAR module, so run the following in your terminal; pear install Console_Getopt

You're now all set to install Drush, run the following commands to do this;

bash
$ pear upgrade --force Console_Getopt
$ pear upgrade --force pear
$ pear upgrade-all
$ pear channel-discover pear.drush.org
$ pear install drush/drush

To check if everything works correctly, run the last command of this tutorial in your terminal: drush version If everything works fine, you'll see drush version 5.4 as output.