System Initialization

PHP installations are typically quite customized -- e.g. different memory_limit, execution timeout values, etc. The first thing that Phing does is modify PHP INI variables to create a standard PHP environment. This is performed by the init layer of Phing that uses a three-level initialization procedure. It basically consists of three different files:

  • Platform specific wrapper scripts in bin/

  • Main application in bin/

  • Phing class in classes/phing/

At the first look this may seem to be unnecessary overhead. Why three levels of initialization? The main reason why there are several entry points is that Phing is build so that other frontends (e.g. PHP-GTK) could be used in place of the command line.