Phar, the PHP .exe format - DPC, June, 2012

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 DPC, Amsterdam, 9th of June, 2012
2. Co-founded Orchestra.io Work at EngineYard PEAR Developer From Iceland @h on Twitter Helgi
3. What is Phar?
4. Phar = PHP Archive
5. Similar to JAR ... But for PHP
6. PEAR: PHP_Archive ‣ Reference implementation ‣ User Land Code ‣ Less Powerful ‣ Works on older PHP ‣ Not maintained anymore
7. Phar PHP Extension Built in / default from 5.3 onwards More Powerful than PHP_Archive
8. Phar unravelled
9. Simple yet flexible File Format
10. Pack multiple files into one
11. Similar to Tar
12. The special sauce 1. Stub 2. Manifest 3. File Contents 4. Signature (optional)
13. Manifest List of Files File Permission File Compression Meta Data
14. Compression Whole Archive Per file gzip, bz2 and zip Available Compressions
15. Stub Piece of PHP code: Bootstraping Autoloader
16. Get all the code used in this talk and more! github.com/helgi/phar-talk
17. Going more practical
18. Normal Include include 'awesome.php';
19. Phar Include include 'phar://example2/project.phar/awesome.php';
20. Phar works via Streams
21. Streams Usage fopen / fwrite / fclose file_get_contents opendir / rmdir / mkdir anything that works with streams
22. header('Content-type: text/javascript'); echo file_get_contents('phar://example3/project.phar/js/zepto.js');
23. Does not extract to disk
24. Works on web and CLI
25. Can be ran without the extension
26. Creating a Phar
27. Phar::buildFromDirectory()
28. if (!Phar::canWrite()) { die("Read-only, php -d phar.readonly=0 web/create.php\n"); } $p = new Phar(__DIR__ . '/project.phar', 0, 'project.phar'); $p->buildFromDirectory('/path/to/project'); $stub = <<<'EOD' Stub Goes Here EOD; $p->setStub($stub);
29. Phar::buildFromIterator()
30. $phar = new Phar('project.phar', 0, 'project.phar'); $phar->buildFromIterator( new RecursiveIteratorIterator( new Phar('/path/to/anotherphar.phar') ), 'phar:///path/to/anotherphar.phar/path/to/project'); $stub = $phar->createDefaultStub('cli/index.php', 'index.php'); $phar->setStub($stub);
31. Bit of autoload magic
32. function __autoload ($load) { include "phar://" . __FILE__ . "/$load.php"; } __HALT_COMPILER();
33. a.php b.php
34. include __DIR__ . '/project.phar'; $a = new A;
35. Gotchas apc.enable_cli = On detect_unicode = On Produces ??? ??? ???
36. Why use Phar?
37. ❖ Command line ❖ Web applications ❖ Setup tools ❖ Plugins ❖ Themes ❖ Libraries Why use Phar?
38. Pros and Cons
39. Pros Single download with all dependencies Run multiple versions in parallel Upgrades are easy No unpacking Security against modifications
40. 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
41. Stubs
42. Bootstrap for phar
43. Smallest possible Stub
44. __HALT_COMPILER() is a minimum requirement
45. Not used when phar file is used via streams
46. Web Phar
47. Phar::interceptFileFuncs() Phar::mungServer() Phar::WebPhar
48. CLI Phar
49. No Phar::WebPhar() Simple file include Shebang for easy execution
50. Web and CLI Phar
51. CLI + Autoload
52. CLI + Autoload cli.php a.php b.php
53. Phar offers a default stub
54. Will work for most
55. Extracts to temp dir if Phar is not available
56. Performance
57. Works with APC
58. Works on files inside the archive
59. Remember, everything goes via PHP Extract static files to a directory and serve from there
60. Security
61. Phar disallows writing by default
62. Suhosin Enabled by default in Debian and Ubuntu
63. Signatures are used to check the integrity of the archive
64. Signature Hashes: MD5 SHA1 SHA256 SHA512 OpenSSL
65. Hashes By default executable Phar is signed SHA1 Tar / Zip are not unless specified
66. Extra Goodies!
67. Phar::mount() Mount external files, such as config into the phar archive
68. PharData Phar archives can be extracted to disk Can operate on non-phar gzip and tar extract and compress archives Like PDO for archives! :-)
69. Useful Tools phar-util github.com/koto/phar-util empir empir.sourceforge.net
70. Questions? @h helgi@engineyard.com Please rate at joind.in/6255 github.com/helgi/phar-talk