In a recent post to her blog Zoe Slattery looks at a way to provide users with a single-file approach to installing an application. Her choice was phar.

I've just finished converting a small procedural application, designed to be run from the command line, to PHP5 . I wanted a way to give users a single file to execute and as phar is included in PHP5.3 I decided to try to use it.

She includes the tree structure for the application and steps through the process she used to make the archive - a call to buildFromDirectory, making a new phar object, adding the contents of files into it and building out a stub that maps the command-line call on the archive to a certain script.