PHP phar://

Introduction

The phar:// stream wrapper is available in all PHP versions after 5.3.0. Phar stands for PHP Archive. It is used to distribute PHP application or library and is executed as a normal PHP file. The phar:// wrapper supports opening file with fopen() for read/write, rename, and directory stream operations opendir() as well as create and remove directories.

Phar class allows packaging application resources contained inside a directory in a phar archive. To perform read operations, this archive is put in phar:// wrapper

Building phar archive

To begin with, ensure that phar.readonly setting in php.ini is set to 0. Then, create a src folder in which all resources of an application are put. Create index.php file

<?php
echo "phar application started";
?>

Use object of Phar class to build phar archive containing files in src folder with buildFromDirectory() method. Specify index.php as setDefaultStub

<?php
// The php.ini setting phar.readonly must be set to 0
$pharFile = 'app.phar';
// clean up
if (file_exists($pharFile)) {
   unlink($pharFile);
}
if (file_exists($pharFile . '.gz')) {
   unlink($pharFile . '.gz');
}
// create phar
$p = new Phar($pharFile);
// creating our library using whole directory
$p->buildFromDirectory('src/');
// pointing main file which requires all classes
$p->setDefaultStub('index.php', '/index.php');
// plus - compressing it into gzip
$p->compress(Phar::GZ);
echo "$pharFile successfully created";
?>

Run above script from command line

php create-phar.php

This will create app.phar in working directory. To run the phar archive, use following command

php app.phar

Using phar:// wrapper

<?php
echo file_get_contents('phar://app.phar/index.php');
?>

This will display contents of index.php file