PHP Configure Error: Please specify the install prefix of iconv with --with-iconv=<DIR>

Question

I'm trying to configure PHP 5.5 on MAMP, following this post:

Having problems while try to install OAUTH with PECL in MAMP on mac OS lion .

After I move the downloaded PHP folders into MAMP/bin/php (I also tried to create a directory of /php5.5.14/include/php as described in the post above) and ran ./configure .

I got an error:

checking for iconv support... yes
checking for iconv... no
checking for libiconv... no
configure: error: Please specify the install prefix of iconv with --with-iconv=< DIR >

Where can I "specify the install prefix" or how can I solve this problem?

Thanks!!

Answer 1

With Homebrew :

brew install libiconv

then

./configure --with-iconv=$(brew --prefix libiconv)

brew --prefix libiconv normally evaluates to /usr/local/opt/libiconv

Answer 2

Do exactly as the error says in your console. It's looking for iconv but it can't find it.

./configure --with-iconv=pathToIconv

I guess we should probably check to see if iconv is installed by running "iconv --help" if it's not installed you can install it with homebrew, or you could add the existing files to your PATH variable. I am not sure how mamp works in this scenario.. PHP should use iconv if it is installed on the machine. Due to the way mamp contains itself it may be full filling this dependency in a weird way. As I understand it best practice is to have iconv built into the php installation so you should put the effort into tracking down the path.To my understanding you can install it without iconv and as long as the dependency is being fulfilled it will run as expected.

./configure --without-iconv

Answer 3

I had iconv installed with MacPorts so the executable was located at /opt/local/bin/iconv . Specifying ./configure --with-iconv=/opt/local did the trick.

Answer 4

I am using phpbrew to install iconv extension into php.

When i tried to install iconv with /usr/local/Cellar/libiconv/1.16

phpbrew ext install iconv -- --with-iconv=/usr/local/Cellar/libiconv/1.16

It returned error:

checking if awk is broken... no
checking for iconv support... yes, shared
checking for iconv... no
checking for libiconv... no
configure: error: Please specify the install prefix of iconv with --with-iconv=<DIR>

It solved using brew's iconv:

brew install homebrew/core/libiconv
phpbrew ext install iconv -- --with-iconv=$(brew --prefix libiconv)

Result:

===> Enabling extension iconv
[*] iconv extension is enabled.
Done.