Question

Homebrew seems to be a really powerful package manager for osx, and the amount of available formulas is really convenient, but I can’t understand something : Why isn’t there any PHP formula for homebrew ?

I mean, there are “custom formulas” to add to homebrew, but no official one.
The weird part is there are a lot of PHP extension available in hombrew, out of the box, such as apc, imagick, xdebug, ffmpeg-php but no PHP. I can’t understand. Could someone explain ? Is there a reason ? A licence issue, maybe ?

Answer 1

I suspect a very real reason (as per my comment) is that Mac OS X has PHP pre-installed (fire up a terminal and type “php --version“) and hence there’s no need to provide the base PHP package.

Additionally, according to the Homebrew github page:

Remember! We don’t accept formula into
mxcl/master that dupes stuff already
included with OS X.

This is explained in additional detail on the Formula Cookbook page.