Phing addition: pearPackageFileSet

SemanticScuttle will be distributed as .phar file with the next version. The command line interface uses PEAR's awesome Console_CommandLine package, which needs to be packaged up in the Phar file to make it work out of the box.

I let Phing handle all of the deployment of new versions, and generating the Phar file is handled by Phing, too.

In general, adding files to a .phar is easy, even a bunch of PEAR installed files: Put their absolute locations in a tag and you're set.

Unfortunately, this solution has several problems:

1. The file of PEAR files may differ from machine to machine.
2. The list of files may get really long - Console_CommandLine has 28 .php files. When I start to use html_QuickForm2 and need to bundle that, there are 67 more files to list. Manually.
3. Package updates may add and remove files, so the list gets out of date easily.

I chose to go the correct way and solve all of the problems by writing a Fileset that takes care of everything. All I have to do is specify the package I want to package up:

This bit of Phing build file XML packages up all Console_CommandLine php files into myapp.phar.

I've opened a feature request on the Phing website to get it included in the official distribution and started a discussion to make it easier to integrate custom types in Phing in the future (see the ticket).

The README is available on GitHub, the code also on Gitorious.

Side note: The rSTTask I wrote about three months ago is part of Phing since 2.4.7.

• Read the original article at Planet PHP