Both pear and pecl tools
should be available everywhere on command line.
For that to work, pear's binary (bin
) directory
should be in your PATH
variable.
To verify it works, simply type pear. A list of commands should be shown:
$ pear
Commands:
build Build an Extension From C Source
bundle Unpacks a Pecl Package
channel-add Add a Channel
...
You should further test that PEAR is up to date:
$ pear version
PEAR Version: 1.7.2
PHP Version: 5.2.6RC4-pl0-gentoo
Zend Engine Version: 2.2.0
Running on: Linux ...
To use PEAR and PEAR compatible packages in your applications,
you normally include them into your PHP scripts using
require_once().
For this to work, PEAR's php_dir
must be a
part of PHP's include path.
First, check where PEAR installs .php
files:
$ pear config-get php_dir
/usr/share/lib/php/
This directory will contain System.php
.
Now it's time to find which configuration file is used by your PHP installation. On command line, execute:
$ php --ini
Configuration File (php.ini) Path: /etc/php/cli-php5
Loaded Configuration File: /etc/php/cli-php5/php.ini
Scan for additional .ini files in: /etc/php/cli-php5/ext-active
Additional .ini files parsed: /etc/php/cli-php5/ext-active/php_gtk2.ini,
/etc/php/cli-php5/ext-active/xdebug.ini
To see which php.ini
is used by PHP on your
web server, create a file with only <?php phpinfo(); ?>
as the contents, and save it in your local web root as
check_php.php
. Open the file in your browser as
http://localhost/check_php.php
, to find the path to
the php.ini
file your web server is using.
Now check PHP's include_path setting on command line:
$ php -c /path/to/php.ini -r 'echo get_include_path()."\n";'
To check PHP's include_path in your web server, create a file with
only <?php phpinfo(); ?>
as the contents, and
save it in your local web root as check_php.php
.
Open the file in your browser as http://localhost/check_php.php
,
to verify the include_path your web server is using.
In every case, PEAR's php_dir
should be in the
include path. If not, add it in your system's php.ini
.
Now that this is done, try including a file. Create a new
check_pear.php
file with the following contents:
<?php
require_once 'System.php';
var_dump(class_exists('System', false));
?>
System.php
is shipped with every PEAR installation
and thus should be on your computer, too.
Open the file with the browser from your web server, and also try
it on command line. The only output should be
bool(true)
A message like:
Warning: require_once(System.php): failed to open stream:
No such file or directory in /path/to/check_pear.php on line 2
means that your include path is not correct. (So go and fix it!)
A completely white page in your browser hints two things:
Your server is configured to not display any errors to the
user/browser (display_errors
Off)
There was an error including System.php
, and
you should check you server's error log.
That's it! Now go on and install some packages.
After changing php.ini
, you need to restart
your web server.
Few people also reported they had to restart the whole machine physically, probably due to PATH changes not propagating correctly. Before wasting hours and after you tried everything else, just try that.
Newer Linux distributions use multiple php.ini
files; mostly one for the web server
(e.g. /etc/php/apache2-php5/
)
and one for command line
(like /etc/php/cli-php5/
).
Make sure you edit the right ones.
On Windows, recent versions of PHP use php.ini
from their own directory (where php.exe
is).
You still might have an old php.ini
in your windows
or system(32)
directory that fools you.
You cannot get away with using absolute paths in your own
require_once() statements as an
altervative to fixing your include_path
,
because all the other files that are then required by your scripts
are all coded for relative pathing based on
include_path
.
php.ini
To get PEAR working properly, you need to adjust PHP's include_path. After you found php.ini, open it in an editor.
Search for the line include_path
.
Now that you found it, you probably will see a semicolon
;
at the beginning. This means the line is a comment.
Add a new line below it.
In this line, write:
include_path="."
Depending on your operating system, add a
:
(Unix/Linux/FreeBSD/Mac OS X)
or a ;
(Windows) after the dot.
Add PEAR's php_dir
after it.
(The directory System.php
is located in!)
The result should look like that:
; Unix include_path=".:/usr/local/php/pear/"
or
; Windows include_path=".;C:\php\pear\"