Pear

The Pear module provides Drupal administrators with an easy way to manage a PEAR installation. This is accomplished by letting Drupal act as a package manager front-end to PEAR. The goal of the project is to provide an easier alternative to go-pear for site administrators that have a Drupal installation with correctly configured file and directory permissions. Beyond that, migration of the PEAR installation to another location on a the same server will be supported and enabled via an easy to use wizard wizard.

2008/06/07

Updates are coming soon!

What will the Pear Module be able to do when it reaches its first stable release?

This module provides features similar to what is provided by go-pear. It will have most, if not all, the functionality that go-pear provides and more.

To be more specific, this module will:

• Manage PEAR channels (places where package information is stores)
• Manage PEAR packages just like PEAR's official web-frontend
• Implement a Drupal-compatable frontend to PEAR
• Allow the path to PEAR to be included in Drupal's include path
• Provide a path to PEAR that other applications can use

Some of the extra features will include:

• installation migration (moving the PEAR directory to a different
  location)
• an awesome user interface courtesy of Drupal's theme implementations
  and Form API
• detailed logging courtesy of Drupal's watchdog

What can the Pear module do right now?

2008/05/07

The current development snapshot of the Pear module will, upon module activation, perform certain installation tasks, and while activated, generate an intentional error.

Durring installation:

• A 'pear' directory is created in the sites 'files' directory. This location was chosen because any other location cannot be assumed to be writable by Drupal.
• A 'installer-bundle' directory is created within the new 'pear' directory.
• PEAR.php, Archive/Tar.php, and Console/Getopt.php are copied from cvs.php.net into the new 'installer-bundle' directory. The reason these files are included with the module is because they are licensed under the PHP License and not the GPL.
• The latest stable PEAR tarball is copied from pear.php.net into Drupal's temp directory (usually /tmp) and extracted, using Archive_Tar, into the 'pear' directory.
• A variable is set which defines the path to this PEAR environment.

After installation:

• On every page request, Drupal will spit out a user-notice error. It will either state the path to the PEAR environment (which can also be used by other applications, not just Drupal, as long as it's converted to a full path) or state that the Pear module installation failed. This information is delivered via an error intentionally because the module is still in development and is not ready for use in a production environment.

What is the Migration wizard?

The Migration wizard will be a guided mechanism, provided by the Pear module, for moving the PEAR installation to another location on the same server. When the Pear module is installed, the PEAR installation is placed within a subdirectory of the Drupal 'files' directory. Although this location isn't bad, there will be many administrators that would prefer to place it somewhere else. The wizard will guide an administrator through the process. First, it will ask for the path to the new location. Then, it will prepare the new location by attempting to configure the file and directory permissions itself. When it can't do something itself, it will prompt the administrator with what changes are necessary. Once everything is set, the wizard will move the PEAR installation to the new location.

IRC

• Join #drupal-pear on irc.freenode.net