Lot 49: Greg Beaver's blog

A few minutes ago, I released phar version 1.2.1. phar is a PHP extension that allows the creation of complete filesystems within a single physical file.  In addition, a bootstrap stub written in PHP can be used to run a phar archive as if it were an executable file or shell script.  Documentation on its usage and how to create phars is at http://php.net/phar in the PHP manual.

This version of phar fixes a number of issues as documented in my last blog post, as well as a quite few issues that Marcus fixed in relation to setting the bootstrap stub, using phar's phar.extract_list INI parameter with an apache module and others (full list here).

In addition, I ran callgrind on the thing and found a few places it could use some trimming of the fat, and was able to cut down the number of stream operations by a factor of 2x when using phar in the most common use case, reading uncompressed files.  In addition, I cut another 2x for phars that have an MD5 or SHA1 signature.

This is quite a good release, looking forward to hearing your stories of using it.