PHAR, the PHP .exe format

Learn about what the PHAR (PHP Archives) format is all about. A PHAR is conceptually similar to a Java JAR but made to fit PHP’s needs.

Hear how to use it to distribute your product to clients, why open source projects have started offering their projects as a PHAR file, run your application directly from the PHAR container without extracting anything to the filesystem, secure it using the signature feature to ensure the container hasn’t been tampered with and many other interesting features.

By the end of it you will be wanting to use PHAR for CLI and Web apps alike!

Transcript

1. Phar, The PHP .exe format Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson PHPDay, Verona, 18th of May 2012
2. Who am I?
3. Co-founded Orchestra.io Work at EngineYard PEAR Developer From Iceland @h on Twitter Helgi
4. What is Phar?
5. Phar = PHP Archive
6. Similar to JAR ... But for PHP
7. Phar PHP Extension Built in / default from 5.3 onwards More Powerful than PHP_Archive
8. PEAR: PHP_Archive ‣ Reference implementation ‣ User Land Code ‣ Less Powerful ‣ Works on older PHP ‣ Not maintained anymore
9. Phar unravelled
10. Simple yet flexible File Format
11. Pack multiple files into one
12. Phar
13. Similar to Tar
14. The special sauce 1. Stub 2. Manifest 3. File Contents 4. Signature (optional)
15. Manifest List of Files File Permission File Compression Meta Data
16. Compression Whole Archive Per file gzip, bz2 and zip Available Compressions
17. Stub Piece of PHP code: Bootstraping Autoloader
18. Get all the code used in this talk and more! https://github.com/helgi/phar-talk
19. Going more practical
20. Normal Include
21. Phar Include
22. Phar works via Streams
23. Streams Usage fopen / fwrite / fclose file_get_contents opendir / rmdir / mkdir anything that works with streams
25. Does not extract to disk
26. Works on web and CLI
27. Can be ran without the extension
28. Gotchas apc.enable_cli = On detect_unicode = On Produces ??? ??? ???
29. Why use Phar?
30. Full Applications
31. CLI Applications Pyrus PHPUnit Composer
32. Web Applications
33. go-pear.phar PEAR installation in PHP builds Setup Tools
34. Supporting Code
35. Plugins Lithium
36. Themes
37. Silex Libraries
38. Handy Packaging!
39. Executable file for applications!
40. Pros and Cons
41. Pros Single download with all dependencies Run multiple versions in parallel Upgrades are easy No unpacking Security against modifications
42. Cons Incremental updates (no deltas) Upgrading is a manual process Web server may need changes Extending the application is harder README / INSTALL become hard to reach
43. Stubs
44. Bootstrap for phar
45. Smallest possible Stub
46. __HALT_COMPILER() is a minimum requirement
47. Not used when phar file is used via streams
48. Web Phar
49. Phar::interceptFileFuncs() Phar::mungServer() Phar::WebPhar
50. CLI Phar
51. No Phar::WebPhar() Simple file include Shebang for easy execution
52. Web and CLI Phar
53. CLI + Autoload
54. CLI + Autoload cli.php a.php b.php
55. Phar offers a default stub
56. Will work for most
57. Extracts to temp dir if Phar is not available
58. Performance
59. Works with APC
60. Works on files inside the archive
61. Remember, everything goes via PHP Extract static files to a directory and serve from there
62. Security
63. Phar disallows writing by default
64. Suhosin Enabled by default in Debian and Ubuntu
65. Signatures are used to check the integrity of the archive
66. Signature Hashes: MD5 SHA1 SHA256 SHA512 OpenSSL
67. Hashes By default executable Phar is signed SHA1 Tar / Zip are not unless specified
68. Extra Goodies!
69. Phar::mount() Mount external files, such as config into the phar archive
70. PharData Phar archives can be extracted to disk Can operate on non-phar gzip and tar extract and compress archives Like PDO for archives! :-)
71. Useful Tools phar-util https://github.com/koto/phar-util empir http://empir.sourceforge.net/
72. Questions? @h helgi@engineyard.com Please rate at joind.in/6373 https://github.com/helgi/phar-talk