1. Copyright © 2006, Zend Technologies Inc. John’s Top PECL Picks John Coggeshall

2. 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 1-Dec-15# 2

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. Compiling PECL from source $ tar –zxvf mypeclext.tgz $ cd mypeclext/ $ phpize $./configure $ make $ make install Compiling example:

8. 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

9. Copyright © 2006, Zend Technologies Inc. My Favorite PECL Extensions

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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”);

13. 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

14. 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’, ‘ ’);  Or by using a Phar object directly: $phar = new Phar(‘/full/path/to/application.phar’, 0, ‘application.phar’); $phar[‘file.php’] = ‘ ’;

15. 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’));

16. 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

17. 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’]);

18. 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(); ?>

19. 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

20. 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

21. 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);

22. 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

23. 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

24. 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(); ?>

25. 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’);

26. 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();

27. 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!

28. 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

29. 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’); ?>

30. Some final thoughts So, for now those are my PECL picks  I’m sure they will change over time! The important thing isn’t which extensions from PECL you use, but more you know to use them!  Many people never even heard of PECL before You have to be careful though, some extensions aren’t ready for prime time

31. Tips on determining readiness When looking through PECL packages, how do you know something is of decent quality?  Many previously core extensions have been moved to PECL verbaitum Ext/dio for example  Look for core PHP devs as maintainers Most of these extensions will, even in beta, be quality code  Look for actively maintained extensions If it hasn’t left beta in two years, or only has one release, be careful  Documentation Extensions that are documented are likely working as- advertised  PHP Bugs Check to see how many outstanding bugs there are for the extension  Google! See if anyone else has been using it with any success

32. Copyright © 2006, Zend Technologies Inc. Questions? Thank you!