Using Phar Archives: the Phar and PharData class
The Phar class supports reading and manipulation
of Phar archives, as well as iteration through inherited functionality of
the
» RecursiveDirectoryIterator
class. With support for the ArrayAccess
interface, files inside a Phar archive can be accessed as if they were
part of an associative array.
The PharData class extends the Phar, and
allows creating and modifying non-executable (data) tar and zip archives even if
phar.readonly=1 in php.ini. As such,
PharData::setAlias() and PharData::setStub()
are both disabled as the concept of alias and stub are unique to executable phar
archives.
It is important to note that when creating a Phar archive, the full path
should be passed to the Phar object constructor.
Relative paths will fail to initialize.
Assuming that $p is a Phar object initialized as follows:
An empty Phar archive will be created at /path/to/myphar.phar,
or if /path/to/myphar.phar already exists, it will be opened
again. The literal myphar.phar demonstrates the concept of an alias
that can be used to reference /path/to/myphar.phar in URLs as in:
With the newly created $p Phar object,
the following is possible:
-
$a = $p['file.php'] creates a PharFileInfo
class that refers to the contents of phar://myphar.phar/file.php
-
$p['file.php'] = $v creates a new file
(phar://myphar.phar/file.php), or overwrites
an existing file within myphar.phar. $v
can be either a string or an open file pointer, in which case the entire
contents of the file will be used to create the new file. Note that
$p->addFromString('file.php', $v) is functionally
equivalent to the above. Also possible is to add the contents of a file
with $p->addFile('/path/to/file.php', 'file.php').
Lastly, an empty directory can be created with
$p->addEmptyDir('empty').
-
isset($p['file.php']) can be used to determine
whether phar://myphar.phar/file.php exists within
myphar.phar.
-
unset($p['file.php']) erases
phar://myphar.phar/file.php from
myphar.phar.
In addition, the Phar object is the only way to access
Phar-specific metadata, through
Phar::getMetaData(),
and the only way to set or retrieve a Phar archive's PHP loader stub through
Phar::getStub() and
Phar::setStub().
Additionally, compression for the entire Phar archive at once can only be manipulated
using the Phar class.
The full list of Phar object functionality is documented
below.
The PharFileInfo class extends the
» SplFileInfo
class, and adds several methods for manipulating Phar-specific details of a file
contained within a Phar, such as manipulating compression and metadata.