NOTES: Installing Geaman’s PHP components on OSX is a frustrating and rather complex task. Know this going in. The only way I was finally able to do this was by reading this page here, from one of PHP’s own engineers, got me pretty close but it was still not a full solution. [HERE]. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!

FIRST THINGS FIRST — Get the right versions!!

Do not use gearman.1.1.7!
As of this writing (7-JUN-2013) the current version of gearmand (gearmand-1.1.7) has a bug that prevents it from properly building on OSX. I waste probably 2 days before in a deep corner of the mind I thought.. “If 1.1.7 has a known bug in OSX, and they have not fixed it yet.. let’s try 1.1.6!, and that worked!! The main Gearman download page has multiple versions so just avoid 1.1.7.

Get the lateset PHP source, (gearman-1.1.2) NOT the one linked off the Gearman page!
Yes.. this wasted even more time. The Gearman page didn’t have a quick easy link to the full set of available versions, and the linked version from the page was very much out of date. There is another build bug regarding PHP. One of the engineers decided to get fancy and change the privacy of the objects members somewhere in 1.0.x tree. This BREAKS build on OSX. They did as recently as this year release a FIX for this which is version gearman-1.1.2. All of them can be had on this page [HERE].

Getting Library Dependancies Worked Out

After fighting with source code, screaming at the screen, and even getting completely frustrated with what I was able to (or not able to) install with MacPorts.. I decided to install HomeBrew and give that a run. It’s not a big deal but I moved that to it’s own page located [HERE].

libevent must be built/installed

You’re going to need libevent, and installing it straight up from brew (nor Mac Ports) did the job for me. Check out my previous pages on installing libevent located [HERE] for details on that exciting exercise.

You Must Install Gearmand (sever) regardless

Regardless of how you plan to user Gearman with PHP, you must have the GearmanD server compiled to create the required libraries. There are no two ways about it, just resign yourself to that and keep moving forward!

First, obtain the Gearmand source code for compile from [HERE]. I dropped min in /usr/local

Unball the file and cd into source code directory, configure and build with the following commands:

david$ cd gearmand-1.1.12/
david$ ./configure -disable-shared -prefix=/usr/local
david$ make && make install

A couple of adjunct notes

If you are having problems location the libevent.. or basically seeing this error:

checking test for a working libevent… no
configure: error: Unable to find libevent

Try setting these two environment variables, to tell the configurator exactly where to locate these libraries, if you’ve managed to build libevent from source:

[gearmand]$ export CPPFLAGS=’-I/usr/local/include’
[gearmand]$ export LDFLAGS=’-L/usr/local/lib’