This is a book I have been awaiting for a quite long time! The book about new version of the PEAR Installer (note: PEAR Installer is part of the PEAR package), the package that allows you to deploy your PHP projects anywhere without a hassle.
As of version 1.4.0, PEAR (Installer) contains channel support, that allows PHP developers to deploy their PHP projects via their own channel server!
As a PHP developer, you might had been playing with the idea to automate deployment processes for your PHP (web)applications, right? OK, maybe not. Frankly, I don't know anyone else in person, who would have tried to do deployment of the entire websites, or PHP applications using PEAR Installer and own channel server. I hope this book will change this soon.
You can actually find quite a few PHP projects that are packaged and deployed using the PEAR Installer.
There are four groups of such projects. The most known and probably also the biggest group is the PEAR repository, that contains official PEAR packages.
Second group consist of packages that are trying to make their way into the official PEAR repository in a form of proposals. This is actually very good source of packages for PHP developers too. To be honest, sometimes even a great package doesn't make it into the official repository.
The outcome of this is pretty obvious. If your package is rejected it pretty much looses the chance to be installed by the PHP developers in the easiest PEAR way. Fortunately, thanks to the new PEAR Installer this is a history now.
Thanks to the Chiara PEAR Server package, everyone can create his/her own server and offer packages to the world. And this is also the third group of PHP projects you can find on the Internet these days. List of the channel servers can be found for example here.
The last group are the PHP projects that offer their releases in a form of PEAR packages. Among many others, great tool Phing (note: now distributed via its own channel. Before you had to download prepared package) and awesome Savant template engine (these two are the usual suspects that you can find installed in my repositories).
So logically, if you develop your PHP project using stuff that you get downloaded and installed from official PEAR repository, or now from the other channel servers, you're only one step away from packaging your own projects and deploying them via your own channel.
I still have in my live memory all the frustrustion of my first unsuccessful attemts to get Chiara PEAR Server installed and all those hours that I spent on first projects which I tried to package and deploy with PEAR.
At the moment pretty much all my projects (websites, open source project and other stuff) and also projects of my clients are packaged and deployed this way. Yes, including this website.
Note: information about packages server from my channel server (pear.kuziel.info) are located on the right-hand side of this blog. 'pear di pear.kuziel.info' discovers the channel if you've PEAR 1.4.0 (and above) installed.
I can tell it was and still is really hard to find relevant documentation that would help. As far as I know, Greg posted step-by-step howto for installing your own channel server and here's what you can find about PEAR 1.4 features in the official PEAR manual. This is the official documentation that currently exists for PEAR Installer and channel servers. Not much indeed.
So, yesterday when I read in my feed reader Greg's post that his book PEAR Installer Manifesto is going to be released by Packt Publishing next week, I was really exited to hear the news.
I already pre-ordered the book (pre-orders are with 20% discount, plus Packt ships for free to New Zealand!!!) and looking forward to read it.
Congratulations Greg!
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