Installing the PHP "memcached" Extension on OS X 10.9 Mavericks / 10.10 Yosemite / 10.11 El Capitan

PHP

Memcached

Mac OS X

Extensions

By  Jesse Donat on 

Oct. 22, 2013 (Updated: Oct. 2, 2015)

Updated Instructions (Oct 2015):
This has been tested in OS X El Capitan and works there as well!

Note: If you are running OS X El Capitan you will need to first turn off "System Integrity Protection" aka "rootless" for these directions to work.

To disable System Integrity Protection, boot into recovery mode by restarting and then holding ⌘R as you hear the startup chime. Then start the Terminal from the Utilities menu.

Run the following command

$ csrutil disable

Then reboot. You are good to go.

If you wish to turn it back on, which you probably should when you are done, follow the instructions above but instead use:

$ csrutil enable

The first step is to install the latest and greatest Xcode.

Install the Xcode developer tools. Apple seems to have removed this option from the preferences so you'll need to handle this from the command line.

$ xcode-select --install

Next we will install the required dependencies. If you are not already using Homebrew you should be.

$ brew install wget autoconf pkg-config libmemcached

You will also want to make sure you have PEAR installed; instructions can be found here but can be summarized as follows:

$ wget http://pear.php.net/go-pear.phar
$ php go-pear.phar

Then in the /tmp directory we will create a folder we can work in.

$ cd /tmp
$ mkdir memcached-work
$ cd memcached-work

Then we will use pecl, part of pear, to fetch the current version of the extension. The version of the memcached extension will vary so you may need to update your paths accordingly.

$ pecl download memcached
$ open memcached-{{version}}.tgz
$ cd memcached-{{version}}/memcached-{{version}}
$ phpize
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

Finally you will need to add the following line to your php.ini

extension = memcached.so

You can verify your installation with the following:

$ php --info | grep memcached\\.

Depending on your setup now you may want to restart apache.

$ sudo apachectl restart

You should be all set to go! Godspeed.