Introducing pearhub

Happy New Year.

In the previous year, I have spent a great deal of time with Ruby on Rails, and one of the things that works better in the Ruby world is the package distribution system (gems, as they are called). A lot of Ruby developers make their libraries available on github, which until recently had an integrated feature to publish the code as a gem. Recently they discontinued this service and instead a dedicated site, gemcutter emerged. Gemcutter is strictly a package hosting service/channel.

I think services like these are an important reason why gems are so popular amongst Ruby developers, and I figured that PHP really needs something similar. So over the Christmas period, I began brewing a service, which is now stable enough that I’ll make it available to the community at large.

pearhub.org provides a place where you can register a project that is hosted on Github, Google code or similar (Currently only git and subversion are supported). The service will generate a PEAR package and put it on a PEAR channel. This means that installation and upgrade can be done from the PEAR installer. New releases are made by making a tag in the linked repository. Pearhub will check routinely for any new tags, and generate a new package if so.

I hope you’ll find it useful, and feedback is of course welcome.