Benjamin Eberlei has a new post today about a deployment technique he's trying out - using PEAR and PHAR to create deployable packages.

With PHP 5.3 the PHAR extension is a pretty powerful concept for all your deployment needs, however it does not tell the complete story. [...] With Pirum being a simple PEAR channel server there is also momentum for projects to distribute their code via PEAR. However PEAR is mostly used in the server-wide configuration use-case, which is not very useful if you plan to distribute your complete application in one PHAR file.

He shows how to create a sample package from a Zend Framework application, set it up in a PEAR channel complete with the ability to run a "pear upgrade" to get the latest version of the package. He also includes a bit of sample code to work with the PHAR archive and load the libraries inside.

Recently Johannes Schluter wrote up a post on searching through archived files (like .tar.gz or .bzip) to perform a full-text search on their contents:

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.

Following up on a previous post of his looking at the phar archiving tool that comes standard in PHP releases now (since v5.3), Cal Evans has revisited the topic and updated his code to reflect some recommendations made from a reader (John Douglass).

So here is the latest version. probably my last version of this particular piece of code. I still believe that a standardized phar packager could be written, possibly using phing but I don't have time to do it right now. If you get around to it, make sure you drop me a line so I can link to it. There is no new functionality here, we just added a few cli options so things aren't hard coded.

Besides updating the code he's also added a quick "help" section to the package.php updates. Full code for the new version is in the post ready for your cut and pasting.

Cal Evans has been working with a new feature included in the recent PHP 5.3 release for a project he's been working on - phar.

In preparation of an episode of boxlunchtraining.com I have been doing a lot of research into creating and using PHP's new phar archives. While I've not answered all my questions yet, I've been able to do most of what I wanted. One of the tasks I wanted to complete was to create a phar archive for Zend Framework. Here is a very quick intro into how I did it. Most of this is just a reminder for me but if you find it useful then I'm glad.

He steps through the process for creating the archive - making the package.php file, setting up the file to add an entire directory's worth of files to the archive (RecursiveDirectoryIterator) and the stub.php to get his autoload working correctly.

Cal Evans had an issue - it involved XAMPP, PHP 5.3, PEAR and phar:

If you are installing PHP 5.3 and when you run go-pear.bat you get this: phar "C:xamppphpPEARgo-pear.phar" does not have a signature.

The short method to getting it working correctly is to update your php.ini file with a few small changes to the require_hash setting. Cal goes through the long method he took to finally get to that point - decision on the platform (XAMPP), version of PHP to use and some googling around that lead him to this and this to help resolve his problem.

It turns out that, if that's on, for security purposes it can't be overridden. Since the default is on, I had to open up my php.ini, find it and set it to off. Once it's off, everything works just fine.

The PEAR blog has a quick note for users of PHP 5.3 and Windows:

Some users have reported that the windows builds of PHP 5.3 are not able to open the shipped go-pear.phar file.

If this is your situation, you can use their workaround (run the distributed phar version) or grab the non-pharred version.

This new post to the PHPClasses.org blog take a look at some of the new features that will be included in the PHP 5.3 release (coming soon to a web server near you!) by way of an interview with Lukas Smith.

his article presents an interview with core PHP developer Lukas Kahwe Smith that has pushed many of the new features of PHP 5.3 as release manager. Lukas talks about PHP 5.3 new features such as lambda functions, closures and PHAR support. He also explains what are traits, which for now it is a feature that was left out of PHP 5.3. He also talks about future PHP 5.x and PHP 6, as well how anybody can help in the development of PHP to make it come out faster.

They talk about the PHP.net wiki, briefly touch on the PHP 5.3 feature updates, performance/memory usage in the new version, Lambda functions, closures and PHAR and what's to come with PHP 6.

Greg Beaver has a new post reporting on his latest efforts to improve the Pyrus PEAR installer and to make it a more strong, stable and robust end result.

One of the problems I found when designing the new code for PEAR 1.4.0 (back in the day) was that it was very difficult to determine whether changes would break things. The main problem revolves around the colossal size of the test suite. [...] This is a real problem when trying to develop with any kind of flow. If, after every change, one needs to sit through 35 minutes of tests, one will never develop anything of substance.

What he wanted was an application that could detect only the files modified and tests those with the results put into the code coverage report. To fill the need, he created test-modified.php to run just the phpt tests needed.

In a recent post to her blog Zoe Slattery looks at a way to provide users with a single-file approach to installing an application. Her choice was phar.

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.

In a quick post to his blog, Nick Williams points out a very handy extension for PHP - Phar.

Today I discovered a very powerful addition to the PHP world. Phar is an archive extension for PHP that allows an entire PHP application to be packaged into a single file. It's basically PHP's answer to Java's .jar archive format. Don't get excited yet, it gets better...

He mentions the reasons that make it "particularly handy" such as it being integrated into the next major PHP release (5.3) and that it makes deployment quick and easy. He includes a brief code snippet to show how a sample Phar archive could be created (via streams).