🥧 PIE (PHP Installer for Extensions)

What is PIE?

PIE is a new installer for PHP extensions, intended to eventually replace PECL. It is distributed as a PHAR, just like Composer, and works in a similar way to Composer, but it installs PHP extensions (PHP Modules or Zend Extensions) to your PHP installation, rather than pulling PHP packages into your project or library.

What do I need to get started?

You will need PHP 8.1 or newer to run PIE, but PIE can install an extension to any installed PHP version.

On Linux, you will need a build toolchain installed. On Debian/Ubuntu type systems, you could run something like:

sudo apt install gcc make autoconf libtool bison re2c pkg-config

On Windows, you do not need any build toolchain installed, since PHP extensions for Windows are distributed as pre-compiled packages containing the extension DLL.

I'm an extension maintainer

If you are an extension maintainer wanting to add PIE support to your extension, please read extension-maintainers.

Installing PIE

Manual installation

• Download pie.phar either:
  • latest stable release
  • latest unstable nightly
• Verify the PHAR's source with gh attestation verify --owner php pie.phar
• You may then invoke PIE with php pie.phar <command>

Further installation details can be found in the usage docs. This documentation assumes you have moved pie.phar into your $PATH, e.g. /usr/local/bin/pie on non-Windows systems.

Extensions that support PIE

A list of extensions that support PIE can be found on https://packagist.org/extensions.

Installing an extension using PIE

You can install an extension using the install command. For example, to install the example_pie_extension extension, you would run:

$ pie install example/example-pie-extension
This command may need elevated privileges, and may prompt you for your password.
You are running PHP 8.3.10
Target PHP installation: 8.3.10 nts, on Linux/OSX/etc x86_64 (from /usr/bin/php8.3)
Found package: example/example-pie-extension:1.0.1 which provides ext-example_pie_extension
phpize complete.
Configure complete.
Build complete: /tmp/pie_downloader_66e0b1de73cdb6.04069773/example-example-pie-extension-769f906/modules/example_pie_extension.so
Install complete: /usr/lib/php/20230831/example_pie_extension.so
You must now add "extension=example_pie_extension" to your php.ini
$

Installing all extensions for a project

When in your PHP project, you can install any missing top-level extensions:

$ pie install
🥧 PHP Installer for Extensions (PIE), 0.9.0, from The PHP Foundation
You are running PHP 8.3.19
Target PHP installation: 8.3.19 nts, on Linux/OSX/etc x86_64 (from /usr/bin/php8.3)
Checking extensions for your project your-vendor/your-project
requires: curl ✅ Already installed
requires: intl ✅ Already installed
requires: json ✅ Already installed
requires: example_pie_extension ⚠️  Missing

The following packages may be suitable, which would you like to install:
  [0] None
  [1] asgrim/example-pie-extension: Example PIE extension
 > 1
   > 🥧 PHP Installer for Extensions (PIE), 0.9.0, from The PHP Foundation
   > This command may need elevated privileges, and may prompt you for your password.
   > You are running PHP 8.3.19
   > Target PHP installation: 8.3.19 nts, on Linux/OSX/etc x86_64 (from /usr/bin/php8.3)
   > Found package: asgrim/example-pie-extension:2.0.2 which provides ext-example_pie_extension
   ... (snip) ...
   > ✅ Extension is enabled and loaded in /usr/bin/php8.3

Finished checking extensions.

More documentation...

The full documentation for PIE can be found in usage docs.