Shashikant Jagtap has a new post to his site today showing how to painlessly install Behat (2.4) with the help of the Composer package manager.

Behat has becoming so popular in recent days. Behat has drastic changes in recent days in order to add some cool features into it. [...] In this tutorial, we will see how to upgrade Behat vesion with use of composer . Most of us have been installed Behat with 'pear' packages. behat version installed with pear has no longer supported.

He includes the commands to remove the current PEAR install (if it's there) and what you'll need to add to your "composer.json" file to pull in the main Behat package as well as the Geherkin parser and Mink extension. There's also a command you can use to be sure everything's working correctly.