Managing phar files using Phive

In the previous section, we learned about using phar files instead of using Composer to install our code quality tools. This approach works fine, but it does require some extra work in case you want to update them.

Phive is a tool that takes over that extra work. Let us install it right away.

Naturally, Phive itself can be downloaded as phar, too. The following commands will download it under the name phive and make it executable:

$ wget https://github.com/phar-io/phive/releases/download/0.15.1/phive-0.15.1.phar -O phive
$ chmod +x phive

Please note that this installation method is not very secure. Check the tool’s website (https://phar.io) to learn how to install it securely and how to make it globally available.

For demonstration purposes, the simple download works just fine. Once the file is downloaded and made executable, you can directly start using Phive to install the first tools. Let us use phploc, which we introduced in...