Repacking your application in a new phar

You have created a Castor application, with many tasks, and you want to distribute it as a single phar file? Castor can help you with that.

Pre-requisites

In your project, install Castor as a dependency:

composer require jolicode/castor

You'll also need box to create the phar. The box binary must be available in your path.

You'll also need to ensure the phar creation is allowed by your PHP configuration. See the PHP documentation to disabled phar.readonly.

Running the Repack Command

Then, run the repack command to create the new phar:

vendor/bin/castor repack

See the help for more options:

vendor/bin/castor repack --help

Note

Castor will automatically import all files in the current directly. So ensure to have the less files possible in the directory where you run the repack task to avoid including useless files in the phar.

Note

If a box.json file exists in your application directory, it will be merged with the config file used by Castor.
None of this keys base-path, main, alias or output keys can be defined in your application box config.

Going further

Packaging your Castor app as a phar simplifies distribution but requires PHP setup on target systems.

Castor's compile command streamlines this by embedding the phar in a PHP binary, creating a static executable for diverse environments.