Phar, The PHP .exe format

Helgi Þormar ÞorbjörnssonPHP Benelux, 27th of January 2012

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Who am I?

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Co-founded Orchestra.io

Work at EngineYard

PEAR Developer

From Iceland

@h on Twitter

Helgi

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What is Phar?

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Phar=

PHP Archive

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Similar to JAR

... But for PHP

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Phar

PHP Extension

Built in / default from 5.3 onwards

More Powerful than PHP_Archive

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PEAR: PHP_Archive

Reference implementation

User Land Code

Less Powerful

Works on older PHP

Not maintained anymore

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Phar unravelled

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Simple yet flexibleFile Format

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Pack multiple files into one

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Phar

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Similar to Tar

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The special sauce

1. Stub

2. Manifest

3. File Contents

4. Signature (optional)

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Manifest

List of Files

File Permission

File Compression

Meta Data

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Compression

Whole Archive

Per file

gzip, bz2 and zip

Available Compressions

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Stub

Piece of PHP code

Bootstraping

Autoloader

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Get all the code used in this talk and more!

https://github.com/helgi/phar-talk

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Going more practical

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Normal Include

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Phar Include

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Phar works via Streams

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Streams Usage

fopen / fwrite / fclose

file_get_contents

opendir / rmdir / mkdir

anything that works with streams

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Does not extract to disk

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Works on web and CLI

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Can be ran without the extension

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Why use Phar?

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Full Applications

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CLI Applications

Pyrus

PHPUnit

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Web Applications

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Setup Tools

go-pear.phar

PEAR installation in PHP builds

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Supporting Code

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Plugins

Lithium

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Themes

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Libraries

Silex

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Handy Packaging!

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Executable file for applications!

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Pros and Cons

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Pros

Single download with all dependencies

Run multiple versions in parallel

Upgrades are easy

No unpacking

Security against modifications

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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

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Stubs

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Bootstrap for phar

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Smallest possible Stub

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__HALT_COMPILER() is a minimum requirement

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Not used when phar file is used via streams

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Web Phar

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Phar::interceptFileFuncs()

Phar::mungServer()

Phar::WebPhar

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CLI Phar

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No Phar::WebPhar()

Simple file include

Shebang for easy execution

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Web and CLI Phar

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CLI + Autoload

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CLI + Autoloadcli.php

a.php

b.php

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Phar offers a default stub

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Will work for most

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Extracts to temp dir if Phar is not available

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Performance

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Works with APC

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Works on files inside the archive

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Remember, everything goes via PHP

Extract static files to a directory and serve from there

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Security

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Phar disallows writing by default

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Suhosin

Enabled by default in Debian and Ubuntu

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Signatures are used to check the integrity of the archive

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Signature

Hashes:

MD5

SHA1

SHA256

SHA512

OpenSSL

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Hashes

By default executable Phar is signed SHA1

Tar / Zip are not unless specified

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Extra Goodies!

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Phar::mount()

Mount external files, such as config, into the phar archive

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PharData

Phar archives can be extracted to disk

Can operate on non-phar gzip and tar

extract and compress archives

Like PDO for archives! :-)

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Useful Tools

phar-util

https://github.com/koto/phar-util

empir

http://empir.sourceforge.net/

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Get all the code used in this talk and more!

https://github.com/helgi/phar-talk

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Come to the winter party tomorrow!Beer and food is on me :-)

And some awesome swag!

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Questions?

@hhelgi@engineyard.com

Joind.in: http://joind.in/4755

https://github.com/helgi/phar-talk

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