A Guide to Using PEAR With PHP

PEAR provides a set of development tools for common PHP libraries and extensions to speed up application projects in PHP. There are common elements of nearly every major application such as email handling, user authentication and security settings that shouldn’t have to be written from scratch. Luckily, you can easily implement these new features with a PEAR library helping you to accelerate development time substantially. As extensive as core PHP code can be, PEAR (or PHP Extensive and Application Repository) provides a framework of PHP components you can use throughout your app.

There are multiple PEAR libraries for a variety of purposes, including a validation library, security library and many others. Any major common element across web applications has its own PEAR library most likely, helping you to save significant time and resources on the development process. Major developers and independent beginners alike utilize PEAR when building their apps, and the shared library of common resources can help your team get your PHP application live in less time. Additionally, with access to major API resources you can work with some of the best 3^rd party tools on the web today to improve your app. You can save countless hours of development times, as well as contributing your own code to the libraries to help fellow developers.

Getting Started with PEAR

Thanks to the active development community, there are dedicated installation packages to get PEAR running on your Apache server in no time. Many web hosts already have PEAR pre-installed, so these steps are just for informational purposes, although people running their own servers will find them essential. The installer is just a PHP script that automatically downloads the software to your server. You can accomplish this with a direct download from the friendly folks at PHP.net:

$ wget http://pear.php.net/go-pear -O go-pear.php
$ php go-pear.php

There are a wide variety of installation options to ensure you get the package installed and running properly.  In particular, you can set the installation directory (/pear seems logical), as well as the names of the sub-directories within your pear folder.  The installer is required to update ethe settings on your php.ini file to add an inclusion for:

include_path = ".:/usr/local/pear/lib" ;

There are further instructions in the .pearrc file, and you’ll also need to add an export path to your .profile file to ensure PEAR can write to your server properly:

export PATH=/home/user/pear/bin:$PATH

Playing with PEAR Command Lines

In order to get the best PEAR options, you can begin installing a variety of common libraries using a basic command line prompt. For example, let’s suppose we install an anti-spam module on our server:

$ pear install Services_Aksimet2

With this command we have a direct connection to the Aksimet API to allow real time filtering of spam comments, which can help to improve the performance and security of your web application.  There are hundreds of libraries in PHP which you can utilize to improve the performance and stability of your application, and having PEAR handy makes the whole process of building a PHP application much more efficient.