Update PHP installation on my Mac, not change PATH

Question

IMHO installing a second PHP installation on Mac OS El Captain and then changing the PATH variable to point at the new installation is complete BS.
That is not the way OS should work and it's making me super annoyed that Apple expects us to do like that.

I want to do a proper installation of the latest PHP version and thus removing the old one.

Is this even possible?
And if yes, how?

Thank you kindly for all help.

Answer 1

To clarify the question.

OS X comes by default with a PHP 5.5 installation (/usr/bin/php). Installing a newer version of PHP on OS X (eg Homebrew) will not replace this default 5.5 installation but will instead place a new PHP version in another location. It will link binaries in /usr/local/bin. To use the new PHP version you have to make sure /usr/local/bin comes before /usr/bin in your PATH variable.

The original poster does not want to update his PATH variable in this way and is asking for a way to update the original 5.5 installation from Apple instead of installing a new one next to it and perform some PATH variable magic.