Embed assets to phar file

[KarelWintersky]

My project have dirs and files

- assets
  - scripts.js
  - styles.css
- engine
  - (some engine files)
- vendor
  - (composer installed files)
- index.php

inside my index.php (or any template) i have a strings:

<script src="/assets/scripts.js"></script>
<link href="/assets/styles.css" rel="stylesheet">

My vhost looks like this:

server {
    listen 80;

    server_name homestead.local;

    root /var/www.projects/example.phar_embed_assets/public/;

    index index.phar index.php index.html index.htm;

    error_log /var/log/nginx/homestead.error.log;
    access_log /var/log/nginx/homestead.access.log;

    location / {
	     try_files $uri $uri/ /index.phar?$query_string;
    }

    # Обработка PHAR файлов
    location ~ \.phar$ {
        try_files $uri =404;
        fastcgi_pass php-handler-8;
        fastcgi_index index.phar;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
        
        fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.phar)(/.+)$;
        fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_path_info;
    }


    location ~ \.php$ {
        include         fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_param   SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        fastcgi_pass    php-handler-8;
        fastcgi_index   index.php;
    }

    location = /favicon.ico {
        log_not_found off;
        return 204;       
    }
}

But when opening the site on a virtual host, the assets (styles and scripts embedded in the PHAR file) do not load.

Instead of a CSS file, I see an HTML page:

How I can embed assets (templates, icons, styles etc) to phar archive and use it?

Complete project:

https://github.com/KarelWintersky/example.phar_embed_assets

[theofidry]

I'm really not familiar with using a PHAR as a webserver, I also don't really see the benefit of it except for SFTP...

The stub used by Box may be wrong (as, it targets CLI apps), so maybe you need to use the default one.

[KarelWintersky]

I'm wondering if this is possible?

The deployment mechanism has nothing to do with it (for example, I'm using Debian packages, not SFTP or docker). However, packaging assets into a file and using them from there would allow, for example, using assets (styles, scripts, icons) by default—and extending the script's functionality by passing it a config.

fastcgi_param APP_CONFIG "/etc/homestead/config/";

For example, here:
https://github.com/KarelWintersky/Homestead

I could build a single file homestead.phar, to which I would pass a config file with links to icons, sites, and the like. The "base distribution" would then have default styles, default scripts, and default icons built into it.

It would be convenient to have one file, rather than several dozen (hundreds) of different ones, “smeared” across dozens of directories.

[theofidry]

I'm wondering if this is possible?

Yes. That much is certain, this is how a lot of PHP websites were working ~15y ago.

Phar has a lot of web related API that you may need to leverage. The first thing I got rid of in Box was some of those settings because the configuration was big enough as it is, I had no experience with PHAR as a webapp (and no need for it).

But it remains nonetheless feasible: you may need to create your own PHAR stub and register it (Box allows that much).

[KarelWintersky]

I use Google Translate, so I hope it translates correctly.

... probably even more. I started working with PHP more or less professionally in 2008 (or so) – I was building a website for the school where I worked. Back then, we had Apache, and the website consisted of a huge pile of small files. Composer didn't even exist back then.

You're probably talking about even earlier times. I started with version 5.2, and it was probably the same with version 4.0. I didn't live to see it. And thank goodness!!!

... a couple of years ago, I was offered the opportunity to support an online casino running PHP4, relocating it to Brazil at my own expense. It was a pretty strange offer. Ridiculous.

[keradus]

at least back in days, it was interesting approach to distribute web apps to clients as phar file, or even tooling like phpmyadmin offered a one-file upload to have all it's took for installation.

fun starts with https://www.php.net/manual/en/phar.webphar.php

(not concluding if this should be scope of box-project)

[KarelWintersky]

Perhaps not. It's not that there's a serious need for this mechanism for my current tasks—I'm simply interested in the possibility of having "the entire project in a single file," as it works for projects written in Go (for example, https://github.com/thomiceli/opengist or Gitea).

In some cases, it would simply be convenient—copying one file and one config, rather than dragging around a whole zoo of Docker.