PEAR (short for PHP Extension and Application Repository) is a framework and distribution system for reusable PHP components. In includes many useful tools and components that can be easily downloaded and installed by using PEAR package manager. This post describes how to install and configure PEAR package manager and then how to use it to install a PEAR package. An example PEAR package used in this post is phploc, which is a tool for measuring the size of PHP projects.

He recommends installing PHP via the Web Platform Installer and use the PHP 5.3 VC9 non-thread-safe package with the PHP Manager. All of the commands needed are included as well as some of the sample output that results. Once you get PEAR installed, then they show how to discover the PEAR channel and "pear install" the right packages for phploc (including the dependencies it might need).

This has been a feature of PHPUnit for some time but has been released as a separate project in the phpunit pear channel. The nature of PHPUnit means that many of these statistics can be collected while the tests are running, which is why it was added to that tool in the first instance.

Stats gathered include the number of directories, files, interfaces, methods, functions and constants with more details for each (like visibility, actual lines of code contained in them and the cyclomatic complexity). The tool is very simple to use - just call it from the command like and give it a path to your codebase. It does the rest and spits out a text-based report.

Exactly one month ago Sebastian Bergmann, of PHPUnit fame, started to implement a similar tool dubbed phploc which can give you an overview of the size for any given PHP project. As I wanted to automate the invocation of this handy tool and collect it's report output out of a Phing buildfile, I invested some time to develop a custom Phing task doing so.

He includes instructions on installing phploc, creating the last in Phing (complete with code) and integrating it into your Phing build.