Not-too-Distant future: self-installing PEAR from a single file

Wednesday, April 6. 2005

Not-too-Distant future: self-installing PEAR from a single file

I've been toying with an idea for quite a while now that I think has some real potential.

As many have noted, the most difficult step in getting PEAR is in fact installing the darn thing. Now, there are several options, but all of them require a command-line.

With a combination of Davey Shafik's PHP_Archive package and PEAR 1.4.0's bundle package.xml type, I think it is possible to distribute PEAR as a single file that you could literally double-click to run and install.

The way it would work is that PEAR would bundle a minimal copy of itself containing only the files needed to install PEAR, and would add a magical phar:// in between "require_once '" and the filename, so that require_once 'PEAR.php'; would become require_once 'phar://PEAR.php';

Then, PEAR installation would literally be able to run right out of its own archive (very slowly) and once the user had chosen a few configuration options of where to put things, it would simply run a PEAR install command on the included package.xml bundle.

The new bundle type of package.xml release is like a wrapper around other packages, so it would contain, for example:

PEAR-1.4.0.tgz
XML_RPC-1.2.2.tgz
Console_Getopt-1.3.1.tgz

and all of these packages would be installed upon installing the bundle.

Once we eliminate the installation difficulty, it will be a huge boon to PHP.

For this to work, Davey has to fix the gz issues he's having with PHP_Archive, and then I'll be able to code a simple installer, as well as design a pear packaging option that allows creating a .phar from a regular PEAR package.

Posted by Greg Beaver in PEAR at 16:07 | Comments (5) | Trackback (1)

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In case you hadn't seen it, you might find it interesting to look at fudforums installer. Nice trick there of embedding a gzip binary inside a PHP script which itself is the installer.

#1 Harry Fuecks (Homepage) on 2005-04-06 16:41 (Reply)

What about go-pear?
(http://go-pear.org)

Put it in your htdocs directory, open it in a browser and click the install button. One file, One click.

What do i miss?

Christian

#2 Christian Dickmann (Homepage) on 2005-04-06 22:41 (Reply)

go-pear requires more than 1 file, and forces download unless the .tgzs are bundled.

I'm talking about a single-file install and go solution.

Most likely, this would be a modified version of go-pear that would simply include files from the .phar, as go-pear is proven. It's an enhancement that would also make installing the bundle for PHP distros much simpler (1 file to sync - boom, done)

#2.1 Greg Beaver (Homepage) on 2005-04-07 07:43 (Reply)

Sounds good! What would be to improve the web installer interface.

The way fudforum's installer works is also an interesting method of doing the installation. Reminds me of how some people do gzipped tarballs in shell scripts.

#2.1.1 Jacques Marneweck (Homepage) on 2005-04-08 09:39 (Reply)

This sounds like a very cool idea, and could do alot for pear and shared hosting providers. I run a small hosting business, and everyone seems to have different needs for pear, so they all end up maintaining thier own. Something like this would allow them to maximize thier pear usage, and leave me out of it!

#3 Mutant (Homepage) on 2005-04-08 07:01 (Reply)

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