Just in case anyone runs into trouble with this, I just want to describe the steps for installing the symfony framework on an OS X 10.5 (Leopard) machine.

The good news is that Leopard comes with PHP 5 built in. The bad news is that PEAR is not included, which is needed to install symfony in the most convenient way.

My first attempt to remedy the situation was to run the darwin ports package manager to install pear:

# port install pear-base

Unfortunately there were two problems. First of all, the version of pear that comes with darwin ports does not use the OS X version of PHP by default, but rather looks for the PHP darwin port. This was easily remedied by adding export PHP_PEAR_PHP_BIN=`which php` to /etc/profile but unfortunately that’s not enough. The second problem is that a few files seems to be missing in the darwin port of PEAR and you’ll get the following error when you try to install symfony:


PEAR_Downloader::require_once(Structures/Graph.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in Downloader.php on line 1230



Indeed, even running pear install Structures_Graph results in this error message.

The Solution

This blog suggested go-pear.php as an alternative way to install PEAR on the Mac and it does work. So with no further ado, this is how to install symfony on Leopard:

sudo su -
curl http://pear.php.net/go-pear > go-pear.php
php -q go-pear.php

pear channel-discover pear.symfony-project.com
pear install symfony/symfony

Good luck with your Leopard powered symfony hacking.