Will there be support for PHP (and its tools)?

[assyrus-favolo]

Question

I'd love to use this tool to keep my team's PHP and Composer versions in line with each other, do you think it would be possible to add them in the future?

Background of the question

I want to leverage all great aspects of this system like easier onboarding, reproducibility, etc.

Example Code

How the configuration could look

packages:
- name: php/php@vA.B.C
- name: composer/composer@vD.E.F

Note

No response

[suzuki-shunsuke]

I guess it's difficult.
aqua doesn't support running external commands except for some specific commands when installing them.
I'm not familiar with PHP, but seems like we need to run external commands to install PHP.

https://www.php.net/manual/en/install.unix.php

If PHP provides files such as zip and tarball including executable files and aqua can unarchive them, aqua would be able to support PHP.

[assyrus-favolo]

I know for Windows there are archives here https://windows.php.net/download/ (with the archive of other versions here), but I don't know where to find tarball binary releases for the other platforms (only found source releases like that at https://www.php.net/distributions/).
I tried looking for them and currently found nothing official, it looks like they were available at some point according to this comment on the docs, but unfortunately it doesn't specify where to get those from my bad, the comment refers to source releases.
For Composer on the other hand I could only find .phar archives, so I guess PHP would be required in order to install it

[assyrus-favolo]

Confirming that there are no official prebuilt binaries for any platform other than Windows:

Are pre-compiled binary versions available?
We only distribute precompiled binaries for Windows systems, as we are not able to compile PHP for every major Linux/Unix platform with every extension combination. Also note, that many Linux distributions come with PHP built in these days. Windows binaries can be downloaded from our » Downloads page, for Linux binaries, please visit your distribution's website.

[assyrus-favolo]

As an alternative it seems like there is this https://static-php.dev/ which makes some archived precompiled binaries available at https://dl.static-php.dev/static-php-cli/ (e.g. under the common directory, startng from version 8.0.30)

[risu729]

@suzuki-shunsuke Sorry for the ping.
Are you open to a PR adding support for PHP using the prebuilt binaries in https://github.com/crazywhalecc/static-php-cli by https://github.com/crazywhalecc/static-php-cli?

There's a related PR in mise jdx/mise#5711, so it would be great if we could use the Aqua backend for it.
However, it might incur some maintenance costs, so I'd like your thoughts, as supporting languages themselves is not the main scope of Aqua.
https://aquaproj.github.io/docs/products/aqua-registry/contributing/#note-of-programing-language-support

Also, if you're open to a PR, I'd like to hear what package names we should use.

[suzuki-shunsuke]

I'm not familiar with static-php-cli and PHP at all.
Seems like static-php-cli is a builder of PHP, not PHP itself.
static-php-cli can be installed by just adding static-php-cli into $PATH, though there are some dependencies, so I guess aqua can support it.
If static-php-cli builds and installs files into out of $(aqua root-dir), I guess there is no problem.
I mean, for instance, if static-php-cli builds and installs PHP into the same directory with static-php-cli, aqua can't support it.
Or if PHP installed by static-php-cli installs PHP third party libraries into $(aqua root-dir), it also doesn't work well.

Note that it's difficult for me to test static-php-cli works fine.

[suzuki-shunsuke]

Oh, you have already opened a pull request.

• feat: add crazywhalecc/static-php-cli aqua-registry#39079

[risu729]

I'm sorry, my comment was wrong. I pasted the wrong URL.

static-php-cli is a tool to generate prebuilt binaries of PHP. So aquaproj/aqua-registry#39079 is not to support PHP itself, but to support the installation of the tool.

The prebuilt binaries generated by it are published in https://dl.static-php.dev/static-php-cli/ officially, so my idea is to add type: http packages like for Maven.

[suzuki-shunsuke]

I see. I'm not familiar with PHP, but I think there is no problem unless PHP has any special requirements, for instance, PHP requires to set environment variables according to the installation path dynamically.

[risu729]

As I had a look for asdf-php, the exec-env hook, which defines the environment variables, only sets COMPOSER_HOME.
I think this is necessary for Composer users, as in asdf-community/asdf-php#55, so it might cause a problem.

I feel sorry, but I also haven't used PHP for a while, so I'll have a look.