PHP Mcrypt on OSX with XAMPP

Was composer not able to find the mcrypt PHP extension? When I developing on my local machine I use XAMPP because it is easy to setup. I also tend to use Laravel for a lot of projects as well. If you are using the same, when doing a composer update you have no doubt encountered this error. Mcrypt PHP extension required.

Writing lock file
Generating autoload files
Mcrypt PHP extension required.
Script php artisan clear-compiled handling the post-install-cmd event returned with an error

It turns out there is an extremely easy way to fix this. Simply update your .bash_profile with the following text:

export PATH=/Applications/XAMPP/bin:$PATH

This will find the XAMPP version of PHP that has mcrypt installed first instead of the one that comes with OSX.

The .bash_profile file allows you to have user defined settings when using Terminal. If you want to user a different version of PHP, you can change it here. Do you want to setup shortcuts? A lot of people will create a shortcut so that ls -l can be run by typing ll.

To do that enter the following in your .bash_profile file.

alias ll="ls -l"

If for some reason you don’t have a .bash_profile, create it in your root user directory. If your username is jeff, the file will be /Users/jeff/.bash_profile.

After you have made your change you may need to source your profile. Execute the following command inside terminal to do it.

source ~/.bash_profile

Once this is done, you should be able to do a composer update without any errors occurring.

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