How To Fix “Error: php@7.3 has been disabled because it is a versioned formula!”

You may see the “Error: [email protected] has been disabled because it is a versioned formula!” message when trying to install this PHP version in Mac systems. What is this error? And how to get PHP 7.3 installed on your machine? Here is the answer.

Error: [email protected] has been disabled because it is a versioned formula!

Homebrew allows you to install a specific version of a package. Many developers choose this method to install version 7.3 instead of the newest release with this command:

brew install [email protected]

What it does is ask Homebrew to find the formula for version 7.3 in the official repository. However, as of this writing, the installation will fail, and you will see this error instead:

Error: [email protected] has been disabled because it is a versioned formula!

What happened? While PHP 7 is still in widespread use, its support has ended. This includes the 7.3 version, whose upstream support ended in December 2021. As a result, Homebrew has disabled the [email protected] formula and prevents users from installing it.

Disabling is one of the mechanisms Homebrew has to deal with packages its developers don’t want or aren’t able to provide official support anymore.

Disabled formulae are still available and can be searched in Homebrew’s database, including its web search page. However, no attempts to install these formulae are allowed. By disabling a formula, Homebrew wants to tell its users that the support for that formula will be removed in the near future.

There are many reasons for this. In addition to deprecated software (like in the case of PHP 7.3), this decision may come from failures to build the formula from the source (which means no bottles), removal of the upstream repository, or the lack of license.

Before completely disabling a formula, Homebrew typically gives it a deprecation period. This typically lasts for about 3 months, but for popular formulae, the period can be longer.

During this time, users can still install that formula, but they will also receive warnings about the planned removal. Users should be fully aware that support for the formula is going to end in the future.

After its disable date, the formula will be removed completely from the main repository (homebrew/core).

Since PHP 7.3 is no longer supported, its formula has been disabled and is about to be removed from Homebrew. PHP 7.4 also met the same fate when its support stopped in November 2022.

You have two options: migrate to PHP 8 or install PHP 7 from a third-party repository.

Install PHP 8

PHP 8.1 is the newest release of this programming language. This is the default version of PHP in the Homebrew repository. You can install it with this command:

brew install php

Install PHP 7.3 From A Third-Party Repository

In the Homebrew ecosystem, third-party repositories are called taps. You can add them to get more formulae, especially those not available in Homebrew’s official repository.

The most popular tap for older PHP versions is shivammathur/php. You can use this tap to install PHP all the way to version 5.6. To install PHP 7.3 from this tap, use these commands:

brew tap shivammathur/php
brew install shivammathur/php/[email protected]
brew link [email protected]

Note: follow this guide if you see “zsh: command not found: brew.”

Summary

The reason for the “Error: [email protected] has been disabled because it is a versioned formula!” message is that Homebrew has officially dropped support for version 7.3 of PHP. You can choose a newer release (PHP 8) or install it from a third-party repository.