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pearhub up for adoption

Posted: September 13th, 2011, 12:31am MDT by Christian Weiske

Troels Knak-Nielsen, father of pearhub, wrote to the pear-dev mailing list:

Hi,

I launched pearhub.org a year and a half back and it has been running fairly nicely since. There are however a number of minor bugs and I'm getting various (quite reasonable) requests to better these about one a week. On top of this, the current server is about to die, so the project needs to move off to a different platform. Unfortunately I have absolutely no time at hand for this project and probably won't for a foreseeable time. I still think it fills a need, so I'd be happy to hand over the keys to anyone who will take it upon them to move the project forward. I'll try to assist as best as I can, but probably won't have much time to spare. But the project is fairly simple anyway, so it should be relatively easy to get the main idea.

Mail me if you're interested.

troels

PEAR itself has enough problems on its own - e.g. the lack of man power - so we won't host it. But if you are interested in hosting and improving a part of the PHP ecosystem, raise your hand and send troels a mail.

Phing addition: pearPackageFileSet

Posted: September 12th, 2011, 2:10pm MDT by Christian Weiske

SemanticScuttle will be distributed as .phar file with the next version. The command line interface uses PEAR's awesome Console_CommandLine package, which needs to be packaged up in the Phar file to make it work out of the box.

I let Phing handle all of the deployment of new versions, and generating the Phar file is handled by Phing, too.

In general, adding files to a .phar is easy, even a bunch of PEAR installed files: Put their absolute locations in a tag and you're set.

Unfortunately, this solution has several problems:

The file of PEAR files may differ from machine to machine.
The list of files may get really long - Console_CommandLine has 28 .php files. When I start to use html_QuickForm2 and need to bundle that, there are 67 more files to list. Manually.
Package updates may add and remove files, so the list gets out of date easily.

I chose to go the correct way and solve all of the problems by writing a Fileset that takes care of everything. All I have to do is specify the package I want to package up:

This bit of Phing build file XML packages up all Console_CommandLine php files into myapp.phar.

I've opened a feature request on the Phing website to get it included in the official distribution and started a discussion to make it easier to integrate custom types in Phing in the future (see the ticket).

The README is available on GitHub, the code also on Gitorious.

Side note: The rSTTask I wrote about three months ago is part of Phing since 2.4.7.

phpfarm moved to SourceForge

Posted: September 2nd, 2011, 4:05pm MDT by Christian Weiske

phpfarm, the tool that lets you install multiple PHP versions beside each other, finally got a proper project page on SourceForge.

By moving from svn.php.net to SF, phpfarm got a nice git repository, a wiki and a ticketing system.

It also has a Phing build file now which generates and uploads release files, so people don't have to install git to get phpfarm.

Changes in 0.1.0

To celebrate the new home, I officially released phpfarm version 0.1.0. It fixes the following issues:

Getting phpfarm from Git

Just because you can download releases now doesn't mean you should not use the git repository directly:

$ git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/phpfarm/code phpfarm
$ cd phpfarm/src/
$ ./compile.sh 5.3.8
$ ../inst/bin/php-5.3.8 --version
PHP 5.3.8 (cli) (built: Sep 03 2011 00:05:23) (DEBUG)
Copyright (c) 1997-2011 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.3.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2011 Zend Technologies

Working with .phar files

Posted: August 25th, 2011, 3:05pm MDT by Christian Weiske

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).

The PEAR installer has been distributed since ages as a single .phar file, thanks to the PHP_Archive package.

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.

Pros and Cons

Distributing a application as Phar is not all sunshine, some things need to be considered:

Plus

The full application - preferably with all dependencies - is contained in one file
No unpacking needed. You drop it into your web server's document directory and it runs
Upgrades are easy, at least for the casual user. Download the new version, use it.
The application's code cannot easily be changed by attackers.
Since all depepdencies are included, setup is painless and you can run several versions in parallel.

Minus

Incremental updates are not possible. You always have to download the full new version.
Upgrading is a manual process unless automated otherwise. If the web app is distributed via a PEAR package, upgrading is much easier for admins.
Looking inside the application and changing files to add own changes is hard.
Access to the README file or upgrade instructions is hard opposed to "normally" distributed PHP applications where you see the README and open it in an editor.
Most web servers do not recognize .phar files, thus initial administrative work is needed until the situation gets fixed.

Conclusion

For me, Phar archives are a nice way to try out new software with minimal setup issues.

Until the Linux distributions have strong Phar support, you should not rely on Phar exclusively to distribute your web application.

Tools to work with .phar files

While .phar files can be saved as .zip and .tar and you can open them with a normal compression utility, adding/extracting the meta data and index file stub is impossible without special tools.

PHP's phar

PHP's source distribution ships with a phar executable that provides a comprehensive interface to Phar files:

$ phar help-list
add compress delete extract help help-list info list
meta-del meta-get meta-set pack sign stub-get stub-set
tree version

With its command line interface, you can create new Phar files, extract files from existing ones or repack, compress, sign and change their meta data and index stub.

Unfortunately, neither Debian nor Ubuntu ship that tool with their PHP packages.

phar-util

Krzysztof Kotowicz's phar-util tool has been written for

building, signing and verifying Phar archives with OpenSSL public/private keys

Either clone the git repository or install it from it's PEAR channel:

$ pear channel-discover pear.kotowicz.net
$ pear install kotowicz/PharUtil-beta

Phing's task

Phing, my favorite build tool, is able to create Phar archives natively:

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 7038 bytes)

Installing PHP extensions for phpfarm

Posted: July 23rd, 2011, 5:13am MDT by Christian Weiske

When using several PHP installations with phpfarm, installing PHP extensions is not always easy - mostly because Pyrus is very strict about package files - and many of the packages in PECL unfortunately have invalid non-validating package.xmls.

Getting the package

While you can download the tgz manually, you can use an existing PEAR installation to get it:

$ cd /opt/phpfarm/
$ pear download pecl/xdebug
downloading xdebug-2.1.1.tgz ...
Starting to download xdebug-2.1.1.tgz (303,198 bytes)
..............................................................done: 303,198 bytes
File /opt/phpfarm/xdebug-2.1.1.tgz downloaded
$ tar xzvf xdebug-2.1.1.tgz
...

Installation

The two things to remember are to use the correct phpize and php-config for the specific PHP version:

$ cd xdebug-2.1.1
$ /opt/phpfarm/inst/bin/phpize-5.3.6
Configuring for:
PHP Api Version:         20090626
Zend Module Api No:      20090626
Zend Extension Api No:   220090626
configure.in:3: warning: prefer named diversions
configure.in:3: warning: prefer named diversions
$ ./configure --with-php-config=/opt/phpfarm/inst/bin/php-config-5.3.6
...
$ make
...
$ make install
...

You need to enable the extension in your php.ini file now. Find its location with /opt/phpfarm/inst/bin/php-5.3.6 --ini.

If you installed xdebug, add zend_extension=/full/path/to/xdebug.so. Most others need just extension=xhprof.so - and make sure that extension_dir is set.