The SitePoint PHP blog has a new tutorial posted showing you how to easily package up your application with Box to make phar files without the extra hassle of building them yourself.

In this tutorial, we’ll use Box to package a PHP application into a Phar, in order to make it easily distributable and globally installable via Composer.

For his example he uses the PHP portion of the FolderBuilder project and makes a command-line executable that can return the information for a directory as JSON data. He starts by installing the "box" executable command on a local VM and defines the simple configuration file, a "box.json" with some basic settings. He then clones the FolderBuilder project, updates the configuration for the correct locations and files and executes the "build" command. The result is a phar file that contains the PHP script functionality. He also updates the configuration to make the result executable with a "chmod" setting, removing the need to call it with the PHP command line version. He ends the post showing how to test it out, taking the results and dropping them into FolderBuilder to make sure they're 100% correct.