How install the latest stable version of PHP 7.2 on OSX using homebrew.

As of this writing PHP 7.2 is still not the official production release, but you can still install it on OSX.

The motivation for writing this post was because I wanted to upgrade from the PHP 5.6 on my mac book to the latest stable version for WordPress development on OSX.  WordPress is phasing out support for older versions of PHP.

This assumes you are using homebrew and know how to use the commandline using either the build in terminal or the iTerm2.

Open a terminal window then

check which version of php you have with the command

we want to use at least version 7

Next update your brew and upgrade existing packages

if you get some errors for some packages you are not using, what can you do?

Remove them of course.  How do you remove homebrew packages?

Use the rmtree to remove homebrew packages.  Here is how you can install and use rmtree:

Next follow these steps to install php 7

Finally run one more check on the commandline to see the version