How to make tar and tar.gz archives with PHP

This question is somewhat painful for me. Maybe I am too stupid. Anyway, if you want to make tar archive without using exec, for example on Windows machine without tar tool or any other stupid reason, here is how to do it with PHP. Its actually very easy if you know how to do it.

For example lets have a directory called dir and we want to make an archive with its content. The solution for our problem is Phar.

Here is the code that do the job:

<?php

// we want to archive all files from this directory
$dir = "dir/";

// the name of our new tar
$phar = new Phar("ourarchive.phar.tar");

// build from our dir
$phar->buildFromDirectory($dir);

// we are using gzip comppression
$phar->compress(Phar::GZ);

?>

Look carefully at the name of our archive - the parameter that we give when we create Phar object. It ends with phar.tar. If you use only .tar it will return error:

Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'UnexpectedValueException' with message 'Cannot create phar 'ourarchive.tar', file extension (or combination) not recognised

This is not fun if you are trying to create tar and you receive this message. So using file name that ends with phar.tar will fix the problem.

If you receive error:
Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'BadMethodCallException' with message 'Unable to add newly converted phar "/www/pro/ourarchive.phar.tar" to the list of phars, a phar with that name already exists'
most likely your tar file already exist.

Learn here how to make Zip archives with PHP

Strange exception

There is a new cry topic in one of the development forums I read, that make me think about this problem of the tomcat application server. The problem is about ojdbc14.zip(or any zip) in a web application. The exception was

org.apache.jasper.JasperException: JDBC Driver class not found: oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver

despite the fact that ojdbc14.zip was in the project lib directory. I've just remembered how much time I spent on a similar problem, so I send him my answer. The reason for this bug is that tomcat have problems with zip archives. Renaming to jar will fix it. I haven't tested if the latest tomcat have zip problem though.