How to Enable PHP module on OS X 10.11 El Capitan

If you are new to web development using Mac, you may ask how to enable PHP module on OS X 10.11 El Capitan along with Apache web server. This post shows you how to enable it.

OS X 10.11 El Capitan Beta 5 which was released on August 19 comes pre-built with PHP 5.5.27 and Apache 2.4.16. You can start Apache web server using apachectl command as root / super user. However by default the PHP module is not enabled.

You can follow this simple task as below:

1. Uncomment the ‘php5_module’ to load the PHP module.

Edit /etc/apache2/httpd.conf and uncomment the following line:

LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

2. Still in editing the file, inside the ‘mime_module’ directive, add the following line:

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php

3. You may also need to activate ‘index.php’ file by adding it inside ‘dir_module’ directive as below:

DirectoryIndex index.php index.html

Restart the apache service then try to access a .php file (for example info.php which shows php information)

Enable PHP module

Hopefully this brief post will be useful for all of you who want to activate PHP module with Apache on OS X 10.11 El Capitan.