John's Top PECL Picks

John’s Top PECL Picks John Coggeshall

Welcome to the session

Welcome to the session!

Who am I:

John Coggeshall

Lead, North American Professional Services

PHP 5 Core Contributor

Author: PHP 5 Unleashed

Member of Zend’s Education Advisory Board

May 28, 2009 #

What is PECL?

PECL: PHP Extension Community Library

A collection of C level PHP extensions for PHP

A spin off from PEAR

PHP Extension and Application Repository

What is PECL?

Historically, the PHP community looked to PECL as a way to manage the release process for extensions

Allow each extension developer to maintain their extension outside of the core PHP

Marginally successful in that regard

Practically, PECL is a collection of PHP extensions which do not have consensus in the core distribution

Less oversight into code quality / completeness

More like Perl’s CPAN

Using PECL extensions

Using PECL extensions is fairly straightforward

A few options are available

Option 1: Use the pecl tool

$ pecl install fileinfo

Downloads the extension, configure and compiles it for use on your architecture

Not always available

Option 2: Compile it yourself

A more advanced approach

Complicates acquiring / installing the extension

Should work in almost every case

Compiling PECL from source

When the PECL tool is unavailable, you can install PECL extensions by..

Downloading the extension’s latest release

Extracting the tarball

Running phpize

Creates a configuration script just for this extension

Compiling the extension

Creates a shared library

Enabling using the extension php.ini directive

i.e. extension=fileinfo.so

Compiling PECL from source

Compiling example:

$ tar –zxvf mypeclext.tgz $ cd mypeclext/ $ phpize $ ./configure $ make $ make install

What about Windows?

You can use PECL in PHP installations running on Windows as well

Actually, it’s much easier

Just download the extension from the PHP web site (pre-compiled)

pecl4win.php.net

Once downloaded just copy to your extensions directory and enable from php.ini

My Favorite PECL Extensions

About my picks

My PECL Picks are based on a number of criteria, which may or may not agree with yours

Direct experience using them

Quality of code / Trusted Developers

Interesting Emerging Technologies

For the most part my selections have to do with data manipulation

Everyone knows about compiler caches and debuggers already

Fileinfo Extension

Very often when uploading files you want to verify what is being uploaded

Verifying extension isn’t enough

Most browsers lie about mime type based on the file extension

Fileinfo to the rescue

Detect MIME types for files based on their content

Uses a “magic” database for determining the type

Fileinfo Extension

Using Fileinfo is straightforward:

$info = new finfo(FILEINFO_MIME); echo “The Mime Type is: “ . $info->file(‘/tmp/myfile.mpg’);

If your “magic” library isn’t in the standard directory you can pass the path as the second constructor parameter:

$info = new finfo(FILEINFO_MIME, “/path/to/file/magic”);

Phar Extension

What’s Phar?

PHP Archive Files

Similar to Java .JAR files

Effectively a virtual file system tailored to PHP

Based on the PEAR PHP implementation and specification

Can store any type of resource you might need for your PHP applications

Creating Phars

Once you have the Phar extension installed, the first order of business is creating a new Phar file

Two ways to create Phars

Using streams:

file_put_contents(‘phar:///full/path/to/application.phar/file.php’, ‘<?php print “Hello World!”; ?>’);

Or by using a Phar object directly:

$phar = new Phar(‘/full/path/to/application.phar’, 0, ‘ application.phar’); $phar[‘file.php’] = ‘<?php print “Hello World!”; ?>’;

Creating Phars

When creating Phar files using the object approach a number of tools are available

Compression on a per-resource basis

$phar[‘realbigfile.data’]->setCompressedGZ();

You can also assign meta-data to any resource in the archive, as well as the archive itself…

$phar[‘images/myimage.png’]->setMetaData(array(‘mime’ => ‘image/png’)); $phar->setMetadata(array(‘bootstrap’ => ‘index.php’));

Using Phar files

Using Phar files is identical to using normal PHP scripts in many ways

You can simply include a .phar file:

Include_once ‘library.phar’;

You can also use stream-access to load specific resources from the Phar:

Include_once ‘phar://library.phar/myfiles/file.php’;

Note: Phar archives cannot work against remote resources

Using Phar files

When a Phar file is opened, you can use the object as an array to manipulate the archive:

<?php $phar = new Phar(‘/path/to/application.phar’, 0, ‘myapp.phar’); // Get a PharFileInfo instance // uses phar://myapp.phar/file.php $phar_info = $phar[‘file.php’]; // Create a new file (or overwrite) called file.php with the contents $contents $phar[‘file.php’] = $contents; // Check to see if a file exists within a phar If(isset($phar[‘file.php’]))… // Erase a file from the phar unset($phar[‘file.php’]);

Using Phar files

Phars can be executed directly creating a bootstrap file..

$phar->setMetadata(array(‘bootstrap’ => ‘index.php’)); [/home/john]$ php application.phar <?php /* index.php */ $p = new Phar(__FILE__); $m = $p->getMetaData(); require "phar://" . __FILE__ . "/" . $m["bootstrap"]; __HALT_COMPILER(); ?>

XDiff

XDiff is a very useful extension for working with different versions of a file

Very similar to the UNIX diff command

Can be used to determine the differences between two versions of the same file

Create Patches from one file to the next

Can be combined with the likes of fileinfo/phar to create robust package management and upgrading

Using XDiff

Creating Diffs is easy

<?php xdiff_file_diff(“input1.txt”, “input2.txt”, “output.txt”);

Which produces an output.txt with…

@@ -1,1 +1,1 @@ -Hello +Hello, World!

Each parameter is a stream, and xdiff_string_diff() is also available

Patching using XDiff

Just like normal UNIX diff, the output created can be used to apply changes to the original file

@@ -1,1 +1,1 @@ -Hello +Hello, World! <?php $patch = file_get_contents(‘mypatch.diff’); $original = file_get_contents(‘myfile.txt’); $patched = xdiff_string_patch($original, $patch); file_put_contents(‘myfilepatched.txt’, $patched);

More XDiff Goodies

It’s worthwhile to mention you can create diffs on binary data as easily as text

xdiff_file_diff_binary()

xdiff_file_patch_binary()

Using the in-memory diffs you can store incremental changes on just about anything

Store database schema changes, or store diffs in the database

Combine with Phar to create update / rollback packages

Zip extension

The PECL Zip extension is a replacement for the zip extension previously shipped with PHP

Much improved from a functional and usability standpoint

Allows for the easy creation, and reading of Zip archive files

Object oriented interface

(Very) Actively maintained

Using Zip: Creating Archives

You can use Zip to create archives easily

ZipArchive::addFile() to add files

ZipArchive::addFromString() to add from PHP variables

<?php $zip = new ZipArchive(); $zip->open(‘myarchive.zip’, ZIPARCHIVE::CREATE); $zip->addFile(‘/path/to/myfile.dat’, ‘newname.dat’); $zip->addFromString(‘myfile.txt’, ‘This is my file…’); print “Total files: “ . $zip->numFiles; $zip->close(); ?>

Using Zip: Reading Archives

You can read archives using the Zip extension in a few ways

Using Streams

Using the API

Stream example:

$uncompressed = file_get_contents(‘zip://myarchive.zip#myfile.txt’);

Using Zip: Reading Archives

You can also use the API of the ZipArchive class to extract files as well

<?php $zip = new ZipArchive(); $zip->open(‘myarchive.zip’); $zip->extractTo(‘mydirectory’); $zip->close(); <?php $zip = new ZipArchive(); $zip->open(‘myarchive.zip’); $zip->extractTo(‘.’, array(‘file1.txt’, ‘file2.txt’)); $zip->close();

SSH2 Extension

The SSH2 extension is a rather useful little tool that allows you to make connections to servers using the SSH transport

PHP-controlled SSH shells

Using SFTP/SCP to transmit files back and forth between servers

Much more!

Using SSH2

Using SSH2 in its basic forms is a fairly straightforward process

<?php $connect = ssh2_connect(‘coggeshall.org’, 22); ssh2_auth_password($connect, ‘username’, ‘password’); $result = ssh2_exec($connect, ‘/usr/local/bin/php –i’); while(!feof($result)) { print fgets($result, 4096); } ?>

Note that $result is a stream which can be read from using any stream access in PHP

Using SSH2: Secure Copy

One of the most useful bits of the ssh2 extension is the ability to secure copy files from PHP

Very useful when transferring sensitive files to servers at run time

<?php $connect = ssh2_connect(‘coggeshall.org’, 22); ssh2_auth_password($connect, ‘username’, ‘password’); // Sending a file ssh2_scp_send($connect, ‘/myfile.txt’, ‘/remotefile.txt’, 0755); // Copying a file from a remote location ssh2_scp_recv($connect, ‘/remotefile.txt’, ‘localfile.txt’); ?>

Some final thoughts