Setting your MAMP binary path in your shell.

Set the MAMP PHP 5.6.10 version of Pear as part of your user PATH.

Add it to the beginning of your PATH like this. First open up your user’s .bash_profile like this:

bbedit ~/.bash_profile

Then add lines like this. This is my preferred method of managing PATH values. If you have a different method of adjust your PATH value feel free to adapt:

export MAMP_BIN="/Applications/MAMP/Library/bin"
export MAMP_PHP="/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.6.10/bin"

export PATH=$MAMP_BIN:$MAMP_PHP:/usr/local/git/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin

Save the .bash_profile and reload it like this:

source ~/.bash_profile

Fixing the Pear configuration file.

It’s worth noting for now that apparently the Pear configuration file pear.conf in the PHP 5.6.10 setup can just be deleted to fix the problem. But haven’t tested it for the other versions of PHP in MAMP.

Fixing the Pear configuration for PHP 5.6.10.

The default Pear configuration file installed by MAMP has a small typo. So it needs to be fixed before anything happens. First open the file like this:

bbedit /Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.6.10/conf/pear.conf

The bad setup:

"php_dir";s:44:"/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.6.10/lib/php";

The good setup; note the trailing slash:

"php_dir";s:44:"/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.6.10/lib/php/";

Or just delete the Pear configuration file:

rm /Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.6.10/conf/pear.conf

Updating the actual Pear library.

This example uses the PHP 5.6.10 version of this process. The overall concept is the same for other versions, just note the path differences when implementing.

Do a which pear to see which version of Pear is being used. It should match the bin path set in the profile such as:

/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.6.10/bin

Which should return:

/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.6.10/bin/pear

which pear

Do a dry run of pear remote-list to see what it gives you:

pear remote-list

It might need to have channel-update pear.php.netset:

pear channel-update pear.php.net

Once that is done, do another dry run of pear remote-list:

pear remote-list

Should now look something like this:

Channel pear.php.net Available packages:
========================================
Package                                   Version
Auth_HTTP                                 2.1.8
Auth                                      1.6.4
Auth_SASL                                 1.0.6

Great! Now pipe that ‘pear remote-list’ into a file:

pear remote-list | awk '{print $1}' > pear-list

Open that file:

nano pear-list

And remove the stuff at the top of the file so it looks like this:

Channel pear.php.net Available packages:
========================================
Package                                   Version

Now pipe that pear-list via xargs into pear install and wait:

cat pear-list | xargs -n 1 pear install