Monthly Archives: June 2009

fileinfo for PHP on Leopard

Currently I had to use the fileinfo-Package on my development-system which is a MacBook Pro running MacOS 10.5 with Marc Lianages PHP-Package.

But sadly that does not contain the fileinfo-extension.

No Problem I thought: Installing a PECL-Extension isn’t hard work.

At least if it works….

Of course I ran into the problem that I couldn’t compile the fileinfo extension due to the following error-message

configure: error: Please reinstall the libmagic distribution
ERROR: `/private/tmp/pear/download/Fileinfo-1.0.4/configure' failed

I can’t be the only one that ran into the problem, I thought. And so it was.

While searching the internet, I generally found two ways to solve the problem.

  1. Use PHP 5.3, that already contains the package
  2. Install a complete second OperatingSystem beneath a perfectly working MacOS. Here for instance I found a way to get the installation working by installing the complete fink-package.

Using PHP 5.3 was no option for me, as we are developing for PHP5.2 and installing a second Operating System seemed somewhat oversized for the simple task of installing a small PHP-extension.

Back to the roots

So what was the original problem again? A missing installation of the libmagic-library. Event though the info-binary is installed on the MacOS I’m running, a shared libmagic-Library is missing.

So what the hell, why not compile one?

Continue reading fileinfo for PHP on Leopard