Till's blog

I noticed that archivers/pecl-phar vanished from the ports tree on one of my FreeBSD servers.

Problem?

Reasons to remove the port were:

• the port is unmaintained
• the port was based on the outdated phar extension from pecl
• phar (in pecl) contains open security issues

The simple solution is to create a new port which of course will use the phar which is bundled in PHP's core. And I will get to that (but feel free to beat me at it ;-)).

Solution

In the meantime, here's a simple solution to get phar on FreeBSD.

At first, make sure you're running PHP 5.3.8 (installed from lang/php5). Then fetch the PHP source and compile the phar extension only.

foo# fetch http://de2.php.net/get/php-5.3.8.tar.gz/from/de.php.net/mirror
foo# tar zxvf php-5.3.8.tar.gz
...
foo# cd php-5.3.8/
foo# ./configure --disable-all --enable-phar=shared
...
foo# make
...

If all goes well the modules/ directory contains a phar.so file (among other phar-things).

The remaining steps are to copy phar.so to your extension_dir and load it in extension.ini:

foo# cp modules/phar.so /usr/local/lib/php/20090626/

Feel free to double-check the location of directory:

foo# php -r 'echo ini_get("extension_dir");'

Finally, make sure PHP loads far by adding the following to /usr/local/etc/php/extensions.ini:

extension=phar.so

Fin

That's all. Once you restart php, or your webserver, phar should show up in phpinfo().

And as soon as a new php5-phar port is added (probably in archivers), you should make sure to delete phar.so and also remove the line added to the .ini.