Compiling your application into a static binary

Packing your Castor application as a phar can be a good way to easily share and use it in various environments.

However, you need to ensure that PHP is installed and configured correctly in all the environments where you want to use your Castor app. This can be a hassle, especially if you don't have control over the environments.

To make things simpler, Castor's compile command can help by creating a customizable PHP binary with a phar, making one executable file that can be used in any setting.

Just pass your repacked Castor app phar as an argument of this command.

Pre-requisites

Follow the repack documentation to produce a phar of your Castor app.

Running the Compile Command

To compile your Castor application, navigate to your project directory and run:

vendor/bin/castor compile my-custom-castor-app.phar

Warning

Compiling is not supported yet on Windows.

Options

Make sure to take a look at the command description to see all the available options:

vendor/bin/castor compile --help

Behavior

The compile command performs several steps:

1. Downloads or uses an existing Static PHP CLI tool to compile PHP and the phar into a binary.
2. If required, it automatically installs dependencies and compiles PHP with the specified extensions.
3. Combines the compiled PHP and your phar file into a single executable.

Post-Compilation

Once the compilation is finished, your Castor application is transformed into a static binary named castor by default (you can use the --binary-path option to change it).

This binary is now ready to be distributed and run in environments that do not have PHP installed.

You can simply run it like any other executable:

./castor