It's official - pear.chiaraquartet.net is live

Tuesday, February 15. 2005

It's official - pear.chiaraquartet.net is live

As of right now, you can use the first fully functional channel server to install a channel server.

pear.chiaraquartet.net provides two packages, Chiara_XML_RPC5 and PEAR_Server. Chiara_XML_RPC5 is a php5-only implementation of both an XML_RPC client and server that works with the same ease that the SOAP extension provides. PEAR_Server is a fully function channel server.

Prerequisites to installing PEAR_Server are:

PEAR 1.4.0a1 - grab this from current CVS
mysql/mysqli
shell access in order to run the postinstall script
PHP 5.0.3 or newer

Prerequisites to installing Chiara_XML_RPC5:

PHP 5.0.3 or newer

Both packages are alpha or devel, so don't expect much right off the bat. I will not be extremely accessible for support until next week. However, those of you who are brave and are NOT running a production site, please try these steps:

$ pear channel-discover pear.chiaraquartet.net
$ pear config-set preferred_state devel [update Feb. 17]
$ pear install chiara/PEAR_Server
$ pear run-scripts chiara/PEAR_Server

Note that you must provide a top-level server domain for this version of PEAR_Server. Soon, it will be possible to do a channel that is based in a subdirectory. Until this time, PEAR_Server wants:

a clean htdocs (http://channel.example.com/ is the channel address, not http://channel.example.com/channel/)
a private frontend file (http://channel.example.com/frontend.php) please do not name your file frontend.php, to make it harder to do some kind of attack
xmlrpc.php at http://channel.example.com/xmlrpc.php
http://channel.example.com/get for storing package releases - the post-install script sets permissions to make this possible, so be sure to run the script as a user who has write access to htdocs

When you are ready to release a package through your channel, please note these steps

log into the frontend with the admin handle and password you provided in the post-install script
add a new package
click on the package name to edit it
click the link to "add Maintainers" at the top of the information form
add yourself as an active lead to the package
click the "upload release" tab and the release will be validated and ready for download

I know, I know, this logic sequence sucks. If anyone cares to take a look at the HTMLQuickForm frontend, and rewrite it so that it doesn't suck, I would be very appreciative.

That's all for now

Posted by Greg Beaver in PEAR at 00:02 | Comments (6) | Trackbacks (4)

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Comments

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Greg, for those of us who want to start our own channel, do we need to register it with pear.php.net, or is there some simpler solution? (And I would be happy to put up wiki space dedicated to documenting these and other aspects of your pear installer work.)

#1 Paul M. Jones (Homepage) on 2005-02-15 05:55 (Reply)

Hi Paul,

The simplest solution for starting a channel is to simply start it and announce it on your blog. However, ALL channels started now need to understand that as we learn from the way things are working, things may need changing.

I've designed this eventuality into the format for channel.xml, but until PEAR goes stable, channels will remain volatile enough that pear.php.net will not offer an official channel list.

Plus, we have to discern the political issues involved in people "grabbing" channels before others do, just so we prevent things from getting real bad, if we can.

Demian Turner has started a wiki for PEAR 1.4.0-related issues, feel free to talk it over with him, if you want to start another one or merge your experiences into his wiki. The link is on the left "Seagull's PEAR Installer Wiki"

#1.1 Greg Beaver (Homepage) on 2005-02-15 15:00 (Reply)

Hi Greg,

I appologize if this is not the right time or place for this question and for not keeping up on the discussion.

Has any though been given to restricting access to a channel? If I want to use channels to distrubute packages only to clients how would I go about that? Can the server be set up to check the username and password config options?

Thanks,
Scott Mattocks

#2 Scott Mattocks (Homepage) on 2005-02-16 10:03 (Reply)

Actually, channels have full support for HTTP authentication on the client side.

PEAR_Server does not have this built in, but you could easily manage this before any code actually gets to PEAR_Server (which is the nice thing about HTTP auth).

For security, ssl is supported by the client-side of the PEAR installer, and this is supported in channel.xml as well, so the combination of ssl and http auth will work. The user simply types:

$ pear login

PEAR then prompts for user and password, and all works normally after that.

So, yes, quite a bit of thought has gone into this exact issue!

#2.1 Greg Beaver (Homepage) on 2005-02-16 17:43 (Reply)

Many thanks Greg. Been looking at the new channel functionality and so far has all worked perfectly (only messed with the client so far). Get the feeling you've done everyone a very big favor and may have opened the lid on easy to distribute libraries for PHP.

One question (which I should probably go and find out for myself but being lazy) - is the client able to resolve dependencies across channels? For example if I publish a package on my channel server which requires a package on some other channel server, can I declare that in the package.xml file and the client takes care of it?

#3 Harry Fuecks (Homepage) on 2005-02-28 00:55 (Reply)

Scratch that last question - just read your stuff on dependencies. Outstanding job!

#4 Harry Fuecks (Homepage) on 2005-02-28 01:07 (Reply)

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