the next revolution in PHP installation

Friday, July 15. 2005

Installation of PEAR has generally been quite difficult. Grabbing go-pear remotely requires downloading a whole bunch of packages, and it has often been necessary to hard-code in specific package versions directly in go-pear to work around bugs in core packages. In addition, maintaining the PEAR bundles distributed with PHP has been a royal pain in the rear end.

This is all about to change. In the past few days, I realized that with the advent of PHP_Archive-based .phar files, it is possible to distribute a self-contained .phar that contains all of the packages needed to install PEAR from scratch. I've blogged about this in the past. What I hadn't realized is that I could simply bundle in an uncompressed PEAR in the .phar itself and use it instead of all the complex download/install stuff in go-pear. This means, for one thing, that it is finally possible to separate go-pear classes into separate files. It also means that instead of maintaining uncompressed copies of PEAR in cvs/php-src for PHP 4.4, 5.0 and 5.1, we can provide a single .phar that will automatically install PEAR the way that the install-pear.php file in cvs/pear-core does now.

In other words, the only stuff we need from the original go-pear is the user prompting for install locations. In addition, we can take advantage of things like the System class bundled with PEAR, and more importantly, the built in installation capabilities of PEAR. Also gone is any incompatibility problems. All core packages can be fully tested before being bundled in the .phar. I have successfully moved the CLI stuff over and will be attempting the move of web-based install very shortly. The next steps (this part is for you Pierre ) include asking for peer review prior to cvs commit, and then finally cvs commit and creation of the .phar for testing. Finally, if all goes well, the .phar will go public as an alternate way to install PEAR.

The .phar cannot replace go-pear entirely, as PHP_Archive-based .phar files use the streams API, and as such can only be used by PHP 4.3.0 and newer. PEAR still fully supports PHP 4.2.0 to 4.3.0. In addition, I have based my work on PEAR 1.4.0, which is still in alpha stages, and so the .phar will not go public until PEAR 1.4.0 stable is released.

Posted by Greg Beaver in PEAR at 19:46 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

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What would be really cool would be to take the concept one step further. Instead of just having PEAR bundled we could include all of PHP and create a wrapper which would be interpreted by a program which exists on most unixlike systems (perl for example).

Then all the user would need to do is drop the latest PHP release bundle into a web accessible folder, and access his scripts like:

http://example.com/php.cgi?index.php

#1 Aaron Wormus (Homepage) on 2005-07-16 11:19 (Reply)

Neato

BTW, when will you around again? I'd like to get together and fix Chiara_PEAR_Server, its badly broken :/

- Davey

#2 Davey Shafik (Homepage) on 2005-07-16 23:28 (Reply)

will it be easier to install local copies of pear with this system? ie, in a shared-host environment for example...

or am i missing the point?

#3 orixilus on 2005-07-17 09:23 (Reply)

yes. I've added an introductory screen that asks if you're installing PEAR for the system, or a local copy.

#3.1 Greg Beaver (Homepage) on 2005-07-18 12:51 (Reply)

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