MAC -> Drush higher bootstrap level? Since a couple of days now, i switched from a ubuntu machine to a macbook pro retina for my development works.

I installed XAMPP on it, without to much trouble.
But I have been struggeling with drush for quite some time now, and I am hoping to find a little help here.

Drush partially works...
I can download Drupal, download modules etc.
I CANNOT enable the modules, perform sql-cli commands (however sql-connect DOES work?!).

The error i get is:

Command pm-enable needs a higher bootstrap level to run - you will need to invoke drush from a more functional Drupal environment to run this command.                                           [error]
The drush command 'en token' could not be executed.                                                                                                                                              [error]
Drush was not able to start (bootstrap) the Drupal database.                                                                                                                                     [error]
Hint: This may occur when Drush is trying to:
 * bootstrap a site that has not been installed or does not have a configured database. In this case you can select another site with a working database setup by specifying the URI to use with
the --uri parameter on the command line. See `drush topic docs-aliases` for details.
 * connect the database through a socket. The socket file may be wrong or the php-cli may have no access to it in a jailed shell. See http://drupal.org/node/1428638 for details.

Drush was attempting to connect to: 
 Drupal version         :  7.28                                                                          
 Site URI               :  http:// default                                                                
 Database driver        :  mysql                                                                         
 Database hostname      :  localhost                                                                     
 Database username      :  root                                                                          
 Database name          :  drupal_site                                                                      
 PHP executable         :  /usr/bin/php                                                                  
 PHP configuration      :  /Users/myusername/drush/php.ini /Users/myusername/drush/php.ini 
 PHP OS                 :  Darwin                                                                        
 Drush version          :  7.0-dev                                                                       
 Drush temp directory   :  /tmp                                                                          
 Drush configuration    :                                                                                
 Drush alias files      :                                                                                
 Drupal root            :  /Applications/XAMPP/htdocs/drupal_site                                           
 Site path              :  sites/default      


Now I have been googling around for this for days and found numerous topics, stating all kinds of things (change your settings.php file to use 127.0.0.1 instead of localhost => did not work)

One thing i would like to add is that i discovered that my OS runs a different php version as the XAMPP instance?!

Ps: My drupal_site is fully functional! Just drush won't work with me.

Any help would be very much appreciated!

Best,
Your drush is using system php, whereas Drupal is using XAMPP's. This reliably creates drush problems.

Look into XAMPP and figure out where its php binary is and then set your path accordingly in .bashrc or whatever other shell init files you have sitting around.

Check your progress with drush status, in particular what it reports for the database connection.