A Short Introduction to PEAR

Joshua Eichorn

Creator of phpDocumentor, Senior Architect Uversa Inc.

What is PEAR

A Collection of PHP libraries licensed with few restrictions (PHP,BSD,LGPL)
Standardize naming and Coding Styles
Rules to keep things from breaking for users
Infrastructure: pear.php.net and an installer
843 developers working on 457 packages with over 14 million downloads

Why PEAR?

Centralized place to find new code
Ease of management, upgrades
Know quality: new package process QA group
Less likely that code will just be abandoned

Some example Packages

DB - Database abstraction
XML_RPC - XML-RPC library (security issues recently, was easy to upgrade)
Mail - Class to send emails
HTML_AJAX - AJAX library (mine)
phpDocumentor - Javadoc like documentation tool (mine)

Using the Package Manager

Instructions at: http://pear.php.net/manual/en/installation.getting.php

In short:

php go-pear.php pear install packagename pear upgrade packagename pear upgrade-all pear install packagename-beta

Using the Package Manager

Instructions at: http://pear.php.net/manual/en/installation.getting.php

In short:

php go-pear.php pear install packagename pear upgrade packagename pear upgrade-all pear install packagename-beta

New Installer features

Channels
phar

Learning more