Laravel requires the Mcrypt PHP extension

Question

I am trying to use the migrate function in Laravel 4 on OSX. However, I am getting the following error:

Laravel requires the Mcrypt PHP extension.

As far as I understand, it's already enabled (see the image below).

What is wrong, and how can I fix it?

Answer 1

You need an all in one environment. You may use MAMP or XAMPP or any other tools. After installing one of these tools you will need to edit(create) your .bash_profile(Assuming that you use bash).

Or even simple and more professional you can use Laravel Homestead.

Here is a link to official documentation: http://laravel.com/docs/5.0/homestead

Also Jeffrey has a free tutorial about it: https://laracasts.com/series/laravel-5-fundamentals/episodes/2

I advice you to go with homestead because you will preinstall all of the following tools.

• Ubuntu 14.04
• PHP 5.6
• HHVM
• Nginx
• MySQL
• Postgres
• Node (With Bower, Grunt, and Gulp)
• Redis
• Memcached
• Beanstalkd
• Laravel Envoy
• Fabric + HipChat Extension

Answer 2

This solved it for me on my Linux Mint local enviroment https://askubuntu.com/questions/350942/cannot-get-mcrypt-for-php5

I needed to make a symlink to my /etc/php5/conf.d/mcrypt.ini file in the following folders /etc/php5/apache2/conf.d/mcrypt.ini and /etc/php5/cli/conf.d/mcrypt.ini

Answer 3

Using Ubuntu, just

sudo php5enmod mcrypt

did the trick for me. You don't need to restart Apache since you need to use PHP just from the CLI.

Answer 4

For those who still come here today:

Laravel does not need mcrypt extension anymore. mcrypt is obsolete, the last update to libmcrypt was in 2007. Laravel 4.2 is obsolete too and has no more support. The best (=secure) solution is to update to Laravel >5.1 (there is no LTS before Laravel 5.2).

Mcrypt was removed from Laravel in June 2015: https://github.com/laravel/framework/pull/9041

Answer 5

On OS X

Using MAMP

Enter the command which php in the terminal to see which version of PHP you are using. If it's not the PHP version from MAMP, the $PATH variable used by Bash will need to be updated.

First, you should use command "cd /Applications/MAMP/bin/php" to check which php version from MAMP and take note of the version (eg, php5.6.7).

Once you know the version, you should edit the ~/.bash_profile file (that is, the .bash_profile that is in your home directory) and add an export line:

    export PATH=/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.6.7/bin:$PATH

Make sure that you replace php5.6.7 with the version of PHP that you have selected in MAMP.

Once the file has been saved, make sure that you close close your Terminal and open it again. Once that has been done, you will be using the PHP that ships with MAMP.

---

One way to easily find what the line should be that you need to put inside your .bash_profile is to run the following command inside your terminal:

    echo export PATH=`cat /Applications/MAMP/conf/apache/httpd.conf \
         | grep php | grep -i LoadModule | head -n1 \
         | sed -e 's/^[^\/]*\/\(.*\)\/mod.*/\/\1/'`/bin:\$PATH

Copying and pasting those three lines into your terminal will correctly output the PHP version that has been selected inside the MAMP control panel.

Using Homebrew/MacPorts

Make sure that your path contains /usr/local/bin/ (Homebrew) or /opt/local/bin (MacPorts) if you are using PHP that comes with either of these two package managers.

Checking the PHP path with MacPorts

You can find the exact location of PHP using MacPorts with the following command:

port contents php70 | grep bin/php

Note that you should replace php70 with the version of PHP that you have installed.

Check the PHP path with Homebrew-php

Homebrew-php (https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-php) is a tap that has various different versions of PHP.

You can find the exact location of PHP using Homebrew with the following command:

brew --prefix homebrew/php/php56

Note that you should replace php56 with the version of PHP that you have installed.

Answer 6

In Ubuntu (PHP-FPM,Nginx)

sudo apt-get install php5-mcrypt

After installing php5-mcrypt

you have to make a symlink to ini files in mods-available:

sudo ln -s /etc/php5/conf.d/mcrypt.ini /etc/php5/mods-available/mcrypt.ini

enable:

sudo php5enmod mcrypt

restart php5-fpm:

sudo service php5-fpm restart

More detail