In my Beyond Frameworks talk, I explained how a component-based architecture can help answer some of the important (i.e. expensive!) questions you might face when creating long-lived apps that rely on a PHP framework. In this series of blog posts, I’m going to look at how to go about creating and working with components.
We’ve created a development tool, called phix, to make it as easy as possible to create and maintain your own components written in PHP. Phix is normally installed onto a development desktop or laptop; you would normally only need to install Phix on a server running Debian if the server is a shared development server or a continuous integration server running something like Jenkins.
Follow these easy instructions to get phix installed on Debian.
Using The One-Line Installer
The easiest way to get phix installed onto your Debian server is to run the following command from a Terminal window:
curl -O http://phix-project.org/installers/debian-6.sh ; su -c 'bash debian-6.sh'
This command downloads a simple shell script (which you can find on GitHub if you want to read it before trying it!), which is then run as the user “root”. The shell script:
- Makes sure that you have a suitable version of PHP installed
- Uses apt-get to install required dependencies
- Uses the pecl command to install PHP extensions that we can’t get packaged for Debian
- Upgrades the PEAR installer to the latest version
- Installs the package phix/phix4componentdev, plus dependencies, from the PEAR channel pear.phix-project.org
If all goes well, once everything has finished, run the following command and you’ll see that phix is now installed:
$ pear list -c phix | grep phix phix 0.13.2 stable phix4componentdev 0.13.2 stable
Where To Find The Latest Installation Instructions
You can always find the latest installation instructions for phix on the Phix project’s website, including full instructions on how to do a manual install if you have trouble with our one-line installer.