Website releases made easy with the PEAR installer

Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson

Who Am I ?

An Icelandic guy with a weird name

iBuildings UK

PEAR Group member

PEAR Developer – among other things, the installer

pear.php.net maintainer

PEAR <insert-job-title> ;-)

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

How to pronounce my name

Þormar Þorbjörnsson being my last name

ASCII version being Thormar Thorbjoernsson

Þ = Th and pronounced like That or a Thorn

Now you are more enlightened about this Icelandic thing called Thorn

Alternative, not a replacement

Deploying websites with the PEAR installer is an alternative, not a replacement for other approaches.

Other alternatives

FTP Upload

SCP / rsync

Capistrano

SVN / CVS / <insert fancy version control> deployment

etc etc etc

PEAR Installer features to the rescue

Easy upgrading

Custom tasks

Post installation tasks

PEAR Installer features to the rescue

Custom file roles

Ability to depend on a PEAR installable packages

Easy to split websites into smaller parts and give each part their own release cycle

Last but not least

Tasks, custom file roles and so on are done with something we are familiar with ....

What is required

The PEAR Installer

Knowledge how to package your code with the installer

A bit of know how and RTFM skills

And not being afraid to read the source ;-)

Dismantling your site

Split your site into logical pieces

Do not split into as many packages as you can!

Micro management is bad, mmmmkay

Dismantling your site

Each piece of site has its own package.xml file

The website it self (the core package) has its own package.xml which all the split off pieces will depend on

Dismantling your site Web Services Backend Frontend Forum Website

The packages we get

Website

Website_Frontend

Website_WebServices

Website_Backend

Website_Forum

Custom file roles

This feature allows you to write your own file roles

PEAR supports php, test, data, www and src by default

People have written their own file roles for various whacky reasons:

In relation to templates

Custom handling of data files

Just to name few

Post installation tasks

Handy feature for all the family

Write a simple PHP task that you can run after the installation

Clean up after the installation, temp dirs or similar

DB setup / upgrade tool

vhost adding / updating

Prime Caches

And just about anything you can dream up

Need to know about post install We do not run post install script auto! Quick output what it looks like to have a post install script around pear/pearweb has post-install scripts: /usr/share/PEAR/pearweb.php pearweb: Use "pear run-scripts pear/pearweb" to finish setup. DO NOT RUN SCRIPTS FROM UNTRUSTED SOURCES

Post install task <file name="postinstall.php" role="php"> <tasks:postinstallscript> <tasks:paramgroup> <tasks:id> askdb </tasks:id> <tasks:param> <tasks:name> yesno </tasks:name> <tasks:prompt> Install database? </tasks:prompt> <tasks:type> yesno </tasks:type> <tasks:default> y </tasks:default> </tasks:param> </tasks:paramgroup> </tasks:postinstallscript> </file>

Post install task pear run-scripts pear/pearweb Including external post-installation script "/usr/share/PEAR/pearweb.php" - any errors are in this script Inclusion succeeded running post-install script "pearweb_postinstall->init()" init succeeded Update pearweb database? [y] :

Post install task

Add more task:param to tasks:paramsgroup so the user gets more questions / prompts per task

Has the ability to skip a param group based on user input

task:type currently has 3 different types

string

password

yesno

Update pearweb database? [y] : 1. Database driver : mysqli 2. Database User name : pear 3. Database password : pear 4. Database host : localhost 5. Database name : pear 1-5, 'all', 'abort', or Enter to continue:

Real world example