Please note: The article below refers to installing mcrypt on Mac OS X 10.5. If you have 10.6 Snow Leopard, please see my updated guide: Install mcrypt PHP extension on OS X Snow Leopard

Adding additional functionality to the standard Apple-supplied PHP on Mac OS X 10.5 is a little tricky if you are running a 64 bit processor such as the Intel Core 2 Duo. The reason is that any dynamic extensions that you add will need to be 64 bit, and many shared libraries by default will compile as 32 bit binaries. Trying to use a 32 bit extension with a 64 bit PHP results in the following unfriendly error message:

PHP Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library './mcrypt.so' - (null) in Unknown on line 0

mcrypt is a good example of a useful extension that can be added to PHP with a little bit of effort:

• Open up your Terminal.app
• To explicitly build for 64 bit architecture export CFLAGS="-arch x86_64"
• Download libmcrypt from sourceforge http://sourceforge.net/projects/mcrypt
• Unpack the archive
• cd libmcrypt
• ./configure --disable-shared
• make
• sudo make install
• download PHP 5.2.6 source from http://www.php.net/get/php-5.2.6.tar.bz2/from/a/mirror
• unpack the archive and go into the php-5.2.6/ext/mcrypt/ dir
• phpize
• ./configure
• make
• sudo make install
• verify the extension is 64 bit: file /usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/mcrypt.so

/usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/mcrypt.so: Mach-O 64-bit bundle x86_64

To actually use the extension, you can simply create a symbolic link to it. For example:

• cd ~/Sites
• ln -s /usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/mcrypt.so

Example code: mcrypt.php

Drop the following code into your ~/Sites directory to verify everything is working:

    <?php
    
    if ( ! extension_loaded('mcrypt') ) {
        dl('mcrypt.so');
    }
    
    $key   = "this is a secret key";
    $input = "Let us meet at 9 o'clock at the secret place.";
    
    $td = mcrypt_module_open('tripledes', '', 'ecb', '');
    $iv = mcrypt_create_iv(mcrypt_enc_get_iv_size($td), MCRYPT_RAND);
    mcrypt_generic_init($td, $key, $iv);
    $encrypted_data = mcrypt_generic($td, $input);
    mcrypt_generic_deinit($td);
    mcrypt_module_close($td);
    
    print_r($encrypted_data);
    
    ?>

Glen Scott

I’m a freelance software developer with 18 years’ professional experience in web development. I specialise in creating tailor-made, web-based systems that can help your business run like clockwork. I am the Managing Director of Yellow Square Development.

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