I noticed that archivers/pecl-phar vanished from the ports tree on one of my FreeBSD servers. Problem? Reasons to remove the port were: the port is unmaintained, the port was based on the outdated phar extension from pec and that phar (in pecl) contains open security issues. The simple solution is to create a new port which of course will use the phar which is bundled in PHP's core.

He includes the simple five or six step process you'll need to follow to compile your own phar extension for your installation - grabbing the latest source, compiling (configure/make) and putting the resulting shared object (.so) in the right place for PHP to find it. All that's left then is to enable it in the php.ini. Phar is an archive creation tool that (normally) comes bundled with versions of PHP and can be used to both read and write to compressed packages.

Phar is a new thing that's developed on the horizon over the last few years that's essentially a PHP archive or library.

He shows how to set up a basic application (non-Zend Framework) that does a "hello world" sort of output showing a date "next week". Also included are the commands to bundle it up into a phar archive using the features already built into PHP. The build stub uses the buildFromDirectory and compression/buffering. He also points out a common problem with the default settings on many PHP installed - an INI setting that disables phar creation. Thankfully, it's easy to change via a ini_set call updating the "phar.readonly" setting.

One of the cooler features of PHP 5.3 is the ability to package up a set of PHP class files and scripts into a single archive, known as a PHAR ("PHp ARchive"). [...] I decided to see how easy it would be to wrap up Neo4jPHP in a PHAR for distribution. [...] Since I also started playing with Phing recently, I decided to see if I could incorporate packaging a project as a PHAR into my build system. It turns out, it's pretty easy, given that Phing has a built-in PharPackage task.

He points you towards Phing's PEAR channel to get the tool installed and includes a command-line call to update your php.ini to allow PHP to generate phar files. Code is included to create the phar-generation stub as well as the XML for the Phing build file. You can find his end result here.

Phar is a php extensions that provides the means for distributing code as a single archive, that does not have to be extracted to a folder before usage. The concept is similar to JVM Jars: each archive becomes a virtual directory where files can be accessed. However, the virtual folder is not limited to class loading, but you can open and read internal files as if it were decompresse into a directory.

He includes a brief "hello world" example of packaging up a script into a phar archive and executing it via PHP. He also shows how easy it is to create an archive from current code, making an archive containing the latest Doctrine 2 release for simple inclusion. Phars also allow compression and hashing but has issues with resource management and access external files.

It is possible to pack an entire PHP web application up in one single file and run it without unpacking it. This files usually have a .phar extension, which is an acronym for PHp ARchive, loosely based on jar (Java ARchive). [...] With PHP 5.3.0, the Phar extension is an official part of PHP. Shipping your applications as Phar thus is safe since 5.2 has reached its EOL already.

He mentions some of the pros (like one file, no unpacking needed) and cons (like no method for incremental updates, changing individual files inside the package is hard) of using them. He also talks about some of the tools you can use to create your own packages including PHP's own support, phar-util and Phing's phar task. He includes a few "things to consider" when making your packages and gives examples from the SemanticShuttle package to illustrate. Thrown in at the end are some benchmarks that show the difference between static file serving (with and without PHP) and the same sort of statistics with Phar packages included in the mix.

I guess you noticed that due your project become larger - the more and more files it contain. Sometimes it comes to the thousands of files. And then - Phar can help you. This utility allows us to pack a variety of files in the single library file. Thus, we can significantly reduce the number of include files in the project, and work with the entire library as with single file. It is also possible to have a packed (gzip/bzip2) version of the library.

They show you how to create simple phar archive (sample code here) that contains a few classes linked by an index.php file.

Probably most of us heard about streams in PHP. They are background of all files and network operations in PHP, even if we don't see it. Everytime when you use file_get_contents or fopen you are actually using streams. But there are many stream wrappers I haven't used, because they aren't well known.One of them is compress.zlib (and two other compression stream filters).

He includes a quick example (because, thankfully, that's all working with streams like this usually requires) about pulling in a file from his server and uses the stream to fetch and unzip the data to display the contents.

I explain how to manage Zip archive files in PHP using a number of demo PHP applications. You'll learn how to create Zip archives, add files and folders inside the archive from a string and from a given path, delete and rename files using their indexes and names and list the ZipArchive object details (number of files, filenames, comments, statusSys, etc.).

Complete code for the examples (along with a few screenshots) are included in the tutorial as well as a link to download the source to get you started even faster.

As said the app is about browsing the PHP manual. The manual is provided as tar.gz to the app and I wanted to have a fulltext search. For accessing the tar.gz content I'm using phar. Yes, phar is not only for phar files but can work on different kinds of archives (tar.gz, tar.bz2, zip), too.

In the code he uses Iterators and a PharData instance to open and search the contents of the given file. He explains how it all works, too, as well as mentioning a few places where it might need a bit of work.

I've just finished converting a small procedural application, designed to be run from the command line, to PHP5 . I wanted a way to give users a single file to execute and as phar is included in PHP5.3 I decided to try to use it.

She includes the tree structure for the application and steps through the process she used to make the archive - a call to buildFromDirectory, making a new phar object, adding the contents of files into it and building out a stub that maps the command-line call on the archive to a certain script.