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PEAR is a framework and distribution system for reusable PHP components.

A PEAR repository is installed either locally or system-wide and is tied to the machine it's installed on.

Wouldn't it be great if you could do a directory-local PEAR install? That could be freely moved around in the filesystem, including other machines? How about multiple project-specific PEAR installations? That you can submit to source control?

With Pyrus and the PEAR2 standards you can. 

Pyrus is the next generation PEAR installer, which is available as a self-contained phar archive: http://pear2.php.net/pyrus.phar

So how do you do this?

Let's say you have a project where you want to install third-party libraries into a 'vendors' directory:

1. Download the Pyrus phar archive and put it in your project 'vendors' directory.
2. Create two directories: 'vendors/pyrus' and 'vendors/pyrus/bin'.
3. Initialize Pyrus using this command from the 'vendors' directory:

   php pyrus.phar ./pyrus set bin_dir ./pyrus/bin

4. A self-contained PEAR2 repository is now installed in 'your_project/vendors/pyrus'.

This is all you need to do, really. 

To illustrate how you install PEAR packages, let's install XML_Parser:

php pyrus.phar install pear/XML_Parser-1.3.4

It should now be installed in 'your_project/vendors/pyrus/php/XML'

You can now go ahead and add it to source control, upload it to your web server, and/or move the directory around. It doesn't need any installation/configuration because it's contained to the 'pyrus' directory inside the 'vendors' directory.

To upgrade our XML_Parser package, we can issue this command:

php pyrus.phar upgrade pear/XML_Parser-1.3.4

Note: Some instructions state that you need to pass the installation directory to Pyrus as the first argument (php pyrus.phar ./pyrus ...) but it works without.

Enjoy your flexible PEAR installs!