How to install custom PHP version with homebrew

In the last two days I've gone from PHP 5 to 8 to 7.1 (OSX Apache default) to 7.2.1 (brew install php@7.2 gave me that version; can't specify eg. 7.2.5) to 7.3 😫.

(Slight digression) Why? Different versions of Laravel (and its associated package, eg. Laravel Nova in my current use case) have vastly different requirements. Folks sometimes blame the modern, JS-based web dev stack for version incompatibility issues, but server side libraries do have the same issue.

To remove PHP 7.3 and install 7.2:

brew uninstall php@7.3
 
brew install php@7.2
 
echo 'export PATH="/usr/local/opt/php@7.2/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile
echo 'export PATH="/usr/local/opt/php@7.2/sbin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile
source ~/.bash_profile

Code from this thread‘s chosen answer: https://laracasts.com/discuss/channels/code-review/brew-install-php-72-instead-of-73 (other posts there and the linked gist were also helpful)

This thread also has good, detailed explanation: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20523183/how-to-use-the-php-that-brew-installed