PEAR Installation Woes

Jul 4, 2007 php

This post is more than 18 months old. Since technology changes too rapidly, this content may be out of date (but that's not always the case). Please remember to verify any technical or programming information with the current release.

I’ve found the need to do some installs from some PEAR channels, so I jumped into my command line on PHP 5.2.0 and windows xp sp2. I ran c:\php5.2\go-pear - which would launch the go-pear.bat file. I executed with standard permissions, and the unthinkable happened - a PEAR FAILURE. OH NO! But I was able to get around it. Let’s look at the details of the error, and my lazy man’s way of solving it:

1-8, 'all' or Enter to continue:
Beginning install...
Configuration written to C:\WINDOWS\pear.ini...
Initialized registry...

Warning: Cannot use a scalar value as an array in phar://go-pear.phar/PEAR/Command.php on line 268

Warning: Cannot use a scalar value as an array in phar://go-pear.phar/PEAR/Command.php on line 268

And it just went worse from there! It finally ended with an installation failure message.

How I solved this issue without messing with the holy binary of PEAR

Pear has a front end now for their installation and management. This can be found here sorta. You actually need to download that source and name it go-pear.php. Load it up in your web browser and go from there.

The only configuration change I had to do was change the default directory prefix from my development testing browser location to c:\php5.2. So far it looks better (plus the web interface was pretty sweet!).