Installing PEAR on Mac OS X

An anonymous reader writes "The PHP Extension and Application Repository (PEAR) is an online repository of high-quality, peer-reviewed PHP classes that conform to a rigorous coding standard. In this MacDevCenter article, Jason Perkins shows you how to install, configure and use the PEAR Package Manager on Mac OS X 10.2."

Comments

Word of Caution

[pudge]

The article says to do this:

% curl http://go-pear.org | php

I'd strongly recommend against that. What if the page has been hacked; or if it is a 404, or an ISP's proxy "can't get to web site" message? Safer to:

% curl http://go-pear.org > pear_install
# inspect pear_install with text editor or pager of choice
% php pear_install

two approaches to PHP class development

[ubiquitin]

There seem to be two separate efforts to bring robust object oriented apps (classes, really ) to PHP. One of them is PEAR, and it is obviously being done in conjunction with the primary PHP development team. The other efforts is Manuel Lemos' PHPClasses.org site. The PHPClasses site is much more grass-roots and currently has a much wider variety of classes available in it. Hopefully these groups can work together. I don't know Manuel personally, but as someone who has followed his web site for about six months or a year, I'm hoping that somebody at Zend or wherever the financial backing is behind PHP can offer this guy a job and take advantage of the momentum that he has built up. It would probably speed up the rate at which classes were submitted to pear.php.net.

Re:coding standard

[Anonymous Coward]

They've since adopted PHPDoc (and recently moved to PHPDocumentor) that, like JavaDoc, will generate documentation from the code itself. The classes that I've tried this with are generating decent documentation (in the whole documentation is like sex, any is better than none mentality).

Re:coding standard

[jpkunst]

It's formatted nice, there are no unchecked parameters, yes, yes. but no docs. bah.

The documentation is contained in those comments. You can extract it automatically into HTML-ized documentation with PHPDoc. It's a bit of a hassle, though, I agree that separate docs are more convenient.

What is it good for?

[4of12]

Just in case you're not familiar with PEAR and what it might be useful for, look at IMP and Horde, a cool web-based IMAP interface.

Another word of caution

[Greedo]

The article also says:

Next you'll need to install the PHP CGI binary before you can run the PEAR Package Manager's Command Line Installer. Execute the following from a new window in Terminal to download and install the PHP CGI binary:

If you've installed a recent version of PHP from source, you should use the --enable-cli flag to configure. This will build the Apache module and a command-line version of PHP, obviating the need to download the (out-of-date) CGI they link to.

PHP may automagically do this anyway, so check first. Besides, it's probably best to have your web-server version of PHP the same as your CGI version.