I recently got involved in a project that uses PHP and Laravel as a framework. I never used PHP before so this means starting from scratch by preparing my OSX environment for some QA and probably some minor development work.

I found a post that seems to cover the installation on OSX of the necessary components.

PHP 54 development on OSX with mysql and Laravel 4

During the installation I got an error with installing zlib. 

curl: (22) The requested URL returned error: 404 Not Found
Error: Failed to download resource "zlib"
Download failed: http://zlib.net/zlib-1.2.7.tar.gz

This error was corrected folowing this solution

https://github.com/josegonzalez/homebrew-php/issues/575

Laravel requires the PHP Mcrypt module. In an earlier attempt I had some trouble to get this working in my environment, but now in this setup using this command:

brew install php54-mcrypt

installed it correctly.