How to Install a PEAR Module

Most business-class hosting servers now come equipped with a PEAR installer via cPanel to allow you to install custom PEAR modules. If you are on a business-class hosting plan (Launch, Power, or Pro) and are on a server that does NOT have this feature enabled, please contact our Live Support team to request to be moved to a newer server.  VPS and dedicated server customers can ask to have this feature enabled at no extra charge.

Custom Installations:

User Submitted: Jim Frenette Web Developer, https://www.brijo.com

This is an article submitted by one of our customers that explains how to set up your own installation of PEAR for php, which in turn will allow you to install your own PEAR modules.

Please note: InMotion Hosting can only provide LIMITED support for third-party softwares, customer installations, etc. We are limited to providing server-side variables only.

1. First, create a directory outside your public_html called “pear.” This folder should be world-readable and writable, which will require permissions of 777.
2. Then, create another folder in your public_html. You can choose the name of this folder, but you may want to password-protect it to restrict access to its files. For purposes of this demonstration, the folder we are creating is called “pear-inst.”
3. Go to https://pear.php.net/go-pear and copy the contents of that page into a Notepad file called “https://example.com/pear-inst/go-pear.php.” This is the main installation file. From here, the only field you should need to edit is the installation prefix, which will be the absolute path:
   
   /home/userna5/pear
   
4. ‘userna5‘ is your InMotion username. You will also want to set the php CLI path in question 11. The path to the php binary is /usr/bin/php.
5. Once the installation is complete, you now have your own instance of Pear installed on your site. You will need to make sure to set the include path in your php scripts to reflect that of your installation, and not the one on the server:
   
   set_include_path('../../pear/PEAR' . PATH_SEPARATOR . get_include_path());
   
6. From here you can also install your own pear packages. To do this, you can create a file called “install.php” in your pear-inst directory and add this code:
   
   include_once "../../pear/index.php";
   
7. When you load this page in a browser (https://example.com/pear-inst/install.php) you will see the standard PEAR installation interface, where you can install your own PEAR modules. For security purposes, you will want to set the permissions of the pear directory to 755 when you are done installing PEAR and other modules.