developerWorks: A Step-By-Step Guide to Publishing Your Own PEAR Channels

IBM’s developerWorks is at it again. They recently published an in-depth article on how to publish your own PEAR channel. Written by Nathan A. Good, the article, A Step-By-Step Guide to Publishing Your Own PEAR Channels is a 13 page tutorial on how you can utilize PEAR to distribute your code.

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.

Nathan does a good job of explaining things. Starting with the “What is PEAR” and quickly moving into how to build your own package file, code your XML-RPC methods and generally give you everything you need to get started. He even goes into a bit of troubleshooting at the end and explains some of the problems he had and how he overcame them.

All in all it’s a good article and up to the standards you would expect from developerWorks. It’s flagged as an “Intermediate” article and rightly so. There are concepts discussed that require experience to grasp. One thing I found odd was that the page count on the article is a bit misleading. The first page reports that it is page 1 of 13. In truth, this article is about 5-6 printed pages including all the sample code. It’s broken up into bite sized bits to make reading easier and the last two pages aren’t even really a part of the article. (Additional Resources and About the Author.) Still it’s a great read and an important read if you are considering using PEAR for distribution of your code.

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UPDATE: Thanks to Chris Cornutt of phpdeveloper.org for pointing out that the original link only brought up a login box. I’ve updated it to a link to the page describing the article. If you are already a developerWorks member you can navigate to the article from that page. If you still want to go straight to the article, here’s the original link .