On PHPMaster.com today there's a new tutorial showing you how to package up your applications using the phar functionality that's bundled in to recent PHP versions.

PHAR ("Php ARchive") is analogous to the JAR file concept but for PHP. If you have PHP 5.3 or greater, the Phar extension is built-in and enabled; you can start using it without any additional requirements. This article is intended to shed some light on this important feature for those who haven't used it before. Hopefully you'll find it a very helpful tool and have a better and faster deployment experience.

They show you how to create a sample project to build the phar from - a simple application that prints out a message and the contents of a configuration file. Code is included to help you build the phar file and how to define the stub file to pull in your application's files and folder.