Enabling PostgreSQL support in PHP on Mac OS X

Question

I\'m having a terribly difficult time getting the command \"pg_connect()\" to work properly on my Mac. I\'m currently writing a PHP script (to be executed from console) to r

Answer 1

This worked for me with OSX 10.9.4 «Mavericks»

Install sources

Download the PHP source code. Unlike on Mountain Lion, you don’t get any headers preinstalled to link against so need to put it in /usr/include/php. Mavericks ships with PHP 5.4.17, but the latest 5.4.x source from php.net should do:

tar -jxvf php-5.4.20.tar.bz2
sudo mkdir -p /usr/include
sudo mv php-5.4.20 /usr/include/php

Configure PHP

cd /usr/include/php
./configure --without-iconv
sudo cp /etc/php.ini.default /etc/php.ini

Building a module

I needed the pdo_pgsql module - the same pattern should apply to just about any module assuming you have the necessary dependencies installed:

cd ext/pdo_pgsql

In my case I had the following error:

Cannot find autoconf. Please check your autoconf installation and the $PHP_AUTOCONF environment variable. Then, rerun this script. ERROR: `phpize' failed

So I had to use this command:

brew install autoconf

Then:

phpize

After that I tried to do: ./configure

but I had the next problem:

checking for pg_config... not found configure: error: Cannot find libpq-fe.h. Please specify correct PostgreSQL installation path

So the solution was to specify correct PostgreSQL installation path:

./configure --with-pdo-pgsql=/Library/PostgreSQL/9.3/
make
sudo make install

That copies pdo_pgsql.so to /usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20100525.

Then simply add

extension=pdo_pgsql.so to /etc/php.ini 

Run php -m to confirm everything went to plan.