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Chapter 7. FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions

Table of Contents
User FAQ
Developer FAQ
Documentation/translation FAQ

User FAQ

I have a question about PEAR. Where should I ask?

Information on subscribing this mailing lists can be found here.

On all mailing lists mentioned above the language is english and the way you ask questions should always be polite :-).

Does PEAR work on Mac OS X?

answer by Brett Bieber

All Mac OS X versions up until 10.5 come with PEAR by default. Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) users will need to install PEAR using the standard installation instructions.

If you are a OS X 10.4 or lower user, you may wish to upgrade to a newer version of PHP using a binary installable package such as Marc Liyanage's PHP packages. If you have installed another PHP package, you may have two versions of PHP and PEAR installed on your system. To be sure which version you are using, type which pear in your console to find out where PEAR is located, and pear -V to find out some info about the pear version, and also pear config-show to see the configuration details.

If you have not made any modifications to the default Max OS X install, the PEAR version you are running is the /usr/bin/pear which is configured for the PHP 4 version distributed with OS X. If this is the case, there are a couple options to use a PHP 5 version on your Mac.

If you're using Marc Liyanage's PHP package, you can specify the full path to your PHP5 PEAR installation. For example /usr/local/php5/bin/pear install {packagename} to install a package for your PHP 5 installation (installing/upgrading packages will probably require sudo).

Alternatively, you can change every path for the OS X provided PEAR using pear config-set. Remember to specify all paths necessary to point to your PHP 5 installation.

What I prefer to do, is remove the Apple supplied PHP 4 with sudo rm /usr/bin/php /usr/bin/pear and then symbolically link php and PEAR in /usr/bin to the location where Marc Liyanage's packages are installed: sudo ln -s /usr/local/php5/bin/php /usr/bin/php && sudo ln -s /usr/local/php5/bin/pear /usr/bin/pear. Keep in mind, Apple occasionally updates PHP on OSX, which will revert your /usr/bin/php to their distributed version. Pay attention to software update, and read the information regarding updated software bundled with OS X updates.

Note: It is uncertain if Apple will continue to distribute PHP version 4 for Mac OS X <= 10.4. So these instructions may change, and may differ for your specific version of Mac OS X. Always consult the Apple documentation to understand the default install provided before making modifications.

Why does my browser show strange warnings when logging in to the website?

You are seeing the warnings because pear.php.net uses a SSL key that is signed by CAcert, whose root certificate is unfortunately not bundled with most browsers.

If you are using a Mozilla browser, you can import the certificate on this site by clicking on the link "Root Certificate (PEM Format)". When asked if you want to trust the new Certificate Authority, you need to check at least the "Trust this CA to identify web sites." box and click "Ok".

People using Internet Explorer may find help here.

Mac OS X users must download the above mentioned PEM file. The certificate can then be imported with the "Keychain Access" utility via "Import" in the "File" menu.

Installing into customized windows folders fails

To know that the folder has a customized view, Windows sets the "read-only" attribute to the folder. The "read-only" attribute is not actually used to control write access. You can create files in a "read-only" folder. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;326549

The PEAR Installer detects the read-only attribute and refuses to install into these folders. Unfortunately, there is no way to distinguish between customized folders and actual read-only folders on Windows.

The work-around is to avoid installing PEAR packages into customized Windows folders.

The downloaded go-pear.php isn't parsed by PHP! Why?

If you have followed the instructions for getting go-pear.php and you are using e.g. Windows and the Internet Explorer, you might get the strange effect that -- although you have named the file go-pear.php -- the file isn't parsed and the PHP source code of it is shown.

The problem is that e.g. the Internet Explorer saves the file as a HTML file with some HTML code around the PHP source code to display the code nicely.

To avoid this problem, you should use the source code view of your browser, e.g. by clicking with the right mouse key and selecting "Show source code" from the context menu. If you save now the file that is shown in your editor as go-pear.php, PHP will be able to parse the file properly.

Please note that the Windows versions of PHP have a file named go-pear.bat bundled. It is recommended to use this batch file on Windows instead of using go-pear.php.


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