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A step-by-step guide to publishing your own PEAR channels

Build a private channel to distribute PHP packages

Nathan A. Good, Author and Software Engineer, Freelance Developer

Nathan A. Good lives in the Twin Cities area in Minnesota. Professionally, he does software development, software architecture, and systems administration. When he's not writing software, he enjoys building PCs and servers, reading about and working with new technologies, and trying to get his friends to make the move to open source software. He's written and co-written many books and articles, including Professional Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, Regular Expression Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach, Regular Expression Recipes for Windows Developers: A Problem-Solution Approach, PHP 5 Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach, and his latest: Foundations of PEAR: Rapid PHP Development.

Summary: The PHP Extension and Application Repository (PEAR) is a collection of PHP packages built to ease the development required to build an application. V1.4 of the PEAR package manager introduced the concept of channels, which are a way to organize and deliver packages that can be installed with the package manager. This tutorial discusses channels, introduces and explains the channel.xml file, and demonstrates how to build a channel for distributing packages. Channels are ordinarily used to expose PEAR packages through the Internet, but enterprises can uses channels to make distribution of enterprise-specific PHP code easy.

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Date: 30 Jan 2007
Level: Intermediate

Activity: 3359 views
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Before you start

About this tutorial

This tutorial introduces channels, which you can use for advanced package management in V1.4 and later versions of the PEAR package manager. The tutorial introduces some commands to use with the package manager for discovering, viewing, and deleting channels.

I wrote this tutorial to provide a base on which to build a custom channel server. Although a few packages are available for implementing a channel server, the server requirements may not work in your enterprise. The examples and steps here will get you going so you can implement a server that works for you.

Before embarking, look at the packages you wish to expose on private channels within your company. Consider their design and whether they can be used by people outside your company. The abundance and quality of PEAR packages is amazing, and I encourage broader contribution so everyone can take advantage of nicely written, reusable code. Information about how to contribute packages to the PEAR channel is available (see Resources).

This tutorial uses a scenario in which a contrived company, which has the intranet domain example.net, has decided to build a private channel and publish domain-specific packages to the channel. The package used throughout is called Account, and it presumably contains classes and methods for dealing with accounts in a manner specific to the owner of example.net.

Objectives

After walking through this tutorial, you should be able to use the example channel.xml file and the skeleton xmlrpc.php file -- along with the examples of the hardcoded implementation -- as a base to implement your own channel server.

This tutorial doesn't offer in-depth coverage of building packages, the proper naming conventions for packages and classes, or PHP syntax. Please see Resources for links to those topics.

Prerequisites

You should be familiar with installing and updating PEAR packages. You also need to know the basics of PHP V5, and you should be familiar with editing and creating XML files. If you have a good working knowledge of XML Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs) and using the pear/XML_RPC package, you will find many of the examples in this tutorial easier to understand.

System requirements

To run the examples, you need to have the following installed, configured, and running:

A Web server that can run PHP scripts
Write access to a document directory on the Web server (e.g., C:\Inetpub\wwwroot or /var/www/)
An integrated development environment (IDE) for editing and validating XML, or equivalent tools
PEAR V1.4 and later (the version used for this tutorial was 1.4.11)
XML_RPC V1.4.0 or later

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