There's always been an issue with the creation of Phar packages in PHP and the security around them. There's been recommendations about creating signatures and only using secure connections for updates and rollbacks. Unfortunately there isn't an overly easy way to handle this yet. However, Matthew Weier O'Phinney has written up a post showing his workflow for doing these kinds of things, making use of the Box project to help with some of the more detailed parts.

For a variety of reasons, I've been working on a utility that is best distributed via PHAR file. As has been noted by others (archive.is link, due to lack of availability of original site), PHAR distribution, while useful, is not without security concerns, and I decided to investigate how to securely create, distribute, and update PHAR utilities as part of this exercise.

This is an account of my journey, as well as concrete steps you can take to secure your own PHAR downloads.

He starts by outlining the "roadmap" of the features he wants to include and the steps to take to create this more secure phar archive. It includes the use of both current, local tools and services (like Box and GitHub pages). He then walks through the steps in the full process:

• Create an OpenSSL Key
• Use Box to create the PHAR
• Generate a version file
• Create the gh-pages branch
• Write self-update/rollback commands
• Enable Travis-CI for the repository
• Create an SSH deploy key
• Archive and encrypt the secrets
• Write a deployment script
• Add the script to travis

While this seems like a lot of steps to just get a more secure phar set up, Matthew has done the hard work for you here and includes all of the commands, configuration examples and steps you'll need to take to fully set the process up. If all goes well, his example in his last "push and watch it work" section will go off without a hitch.