How to use MAMP's version of PHP instead of the default on OSX

Question

I would like to use MAMP\'s version of PHP instead of the default installed on my mac. I tried using

ln -s /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5.3/bin/php php <

Answer 1

Well none of this was working for me with OSX10.12.5

i have mac ports php70 installed at /opt/local/bin

which php showed:

/usr/bin/php

I set up the aliases and local paths etc, which mostly worked for me, but other programs were failing (like composer) so the solution for me was to prepend:

/opt/local/bin
/opt/local/sbin

to the file /etc/paths

then it all worked a charm!