RuslanY Blog

PEAR (short for PHP Extension and Application Repository) is a framework and distribution system for reusable PHP components. In includes many useful tools and components that can be easily downloaded and installed by using PEAR package manager. This post describes how to install and configure PEAR package manager and then how to use it to install a PEAR package. An example PEAR package used in this post is phploc, which is a tool for measuring the size of PHP projects.

Start by installing PHP on Windows by using one of the following methods:

• Install PHP for by using Web PI 3.0. With that you can install PHP for either IIS or WebMatrix or both;
• Download and unpack the PHP 5.3 VC9 non-thread-safe zip package and then register it with IIS by using PHP Manager.

Now open an elevated command line prompt and go to the directory where PHP was installed. For example if PHP 5.3 was installed with Web PI 3.0 then the directory path will be: Continue Reading »

WebMatrix Beta 3 release has been announced recently. This release includes many new cool features that are described in release announcement and in the Web Deploy team blog. In addition to all those improvements, WebMatrix Beta 3 has much better support for PHP. Specifically:

• It is now possible to enable PHP 5.3 (previous versions of WebMatrix and Web PI only supported PHP 5.2)
• PHP can now be enabled on an empty new site in WebMatrix (previously it was required to install a PHP application in order to enable PHP on a site)
• PEAR installation is now included when PHP is installed.

This post describes those improvements in more details. Continue Reading »