vendor-compress

Compress vendor directory into one vendor.phar file.

This is a project completely for fun and as a PoC. It is rather unusual to have to compress the vendor directory to save a few megabytes.

The idea for this project was born recently, when I had to work in a very restricted environment (server with 10 MiB disk space for a visit card page) and every byte counted. I decided to share this solution, maybe it will be useful to someone.

The package is created as minimal as possible.

What does it do?

Basically, it packs the content of vendor/ directory into single PHAR file, optionally compressing it and performing other disk-space optimizations. And tries to make all of it working :)

The original vendor/ directory is not removed nor modified!

How to use

Generate vendor.phar (or vendor.phar.gz or vendor.phar.bz2 depending on configuration; see below) file:

bin/vendor-compress [options] [<path>]

Arguments:

Argument	Description
path	Path to the project or vendor directory from which generate PHAR. If not provided, current project is used.

Options:

Option	Description
-c, --configuration	Path to configuration file.
--memory-limit	Set PHP memory limit for current run.
-o, --override	Defines to override vendor.phar file if it already exists. Without that, if file exists, the generation will not be performed.
-h, --help	Display the help message
-q, --quiet	Do not output any message

Then use it:

// Replace
require __DIR__ . 'vendor/autoload.php';

// With (add .gz/.bz2 if archive-compressed)
require __DIR__ . 'vendor.phar';

// Or replace with auto-detection of proper vendor source
is_file(__DIR__ . 'vendor.phar') ? require __DIR__ . 'vendor.phar' : require __DIR__ . 'vendor/autoload.php';

Configuration

For easier configuration managing, You can create dedicated file that will be loaded. It must return an instance of \Donatorsky\VendorCompress\Config class. There is one here (see .vendor_compress.dist) that works as a fallback if no configuration was provided:

<?php
declare(strict_types=1);

use Donatorsky\VendorCompress\Config;
use Donatorsky\VendorCompress\FileFilters\BasenameFilter;
use Donatorsky\VendorCompress\FileFilters\BasenameRegexFilter;
use Donatorsky\VendorCompress\FileFilters\ExtensionFilter;
use Donatorsky\VendorCompress\FileFilters\IsDirectoryFilter;
use Donatorsky\VendorCompress\FileFilters\IsFileFilter;
use Donatorsky\VendorCompress\FileFilters\VendorPackageFilter;
use Donatorsky\VendorCompress\FileProcessors\MinifyJsonFileProcessor;
use Donatorsky\VendorCompress\FileProcessors\StripWhitespacesPhpFileProcessor;

return Config::create()
	->setFilesCompressionMethod(Phar::NONE) // It is also default
	->setArchiveCompressionMethod(Phar::NONE) // It is also default
	->setExcluded([
		new VendorPackageFilter('donatorsky', 'vendor-compress'),
		new IsDirectoryFilter(new BasenameFilter('docs')),
		new IsDirectoryFilter(new BasenameFilter('tests')),
		new IsFileFilter(new BasenameFilter('composer.json')),
		new IsFileFilter(new BasenameFilter('composer.lock')),
		new IsFileFilter(new BasenameFilter('.gitignore')),
		new IsFileFilter(new BasenameRegexFilter('/^(?:README|CHANGELOG|phpunit.*\.xml.*$)/i')),
	])
	->addFileProcessor(new MinifyJsonFileProcessor(), new ExtensionFilter('json'))
	->addFileProcessor(new StripWhitespacesPhpFileProcessor(), new ExtensionFilter('php'));

You can create your own .vendor_compress or .vendor_compress.dist configuraton file in working directory (usually project's root directory) or specify path to the configuration file using --configuration option. Tthe order of loading configurationis:

• One specified via --configuration. If does no exist, command will fail.
• Current Working Directory (CWD)/.vendor_compress,
• CWD/.vendor_compress.dist,
• vendor/donatorsky/vendor-compress/.vendor_compress.dist).

Available configuration options

Below is the list of all available options.

setFilesCompressionMethod(int $filesCompressionMethod)

Allows to set compression method that will be used for compressing each file individually. $filesCompressionMethod should be one of supported compressions available via \Phar::CONSTANT constant.

setArchiveCompressionMethod(int $archiveCompressionMethod)

Allows to set compression method that will be used for compressing whole file. The difference between setFilesCompressionMethod() is that with this option, the whole archive will be compressed at once at the end. It may be more efficient to do this in that way (see comparison below). $archiveCompressionMethod should be one of supported compressions available via \Phar::CONSTANT constant.

setAlias(string $alias)

Allows to alias with which generated Phar archive should be referred to in calls to stream functionality. See more at: https://secure.php.net/manual/en/phar.construct.php.

addExcluded(\Donatorsky\VendorCompress\Contracts\FileFilterInterface $fileFilter)

Allows to add file/directory exclusion rule used for vendor files list generation. There are already some rules included (see src/FileFilters/) that You can use, or write Your own.

setExcluded(\Donatorsky\VendorCompress\Contracts\FileFilterInterface[] $fileFilters)

Allows to set multiple file/directory exclusion rules at once. This overrides existing list of rules.

addIncluded(\Donatorsky\VendorCompress\Contracts\FileFilterInterface $fileFilter)

Allows to add file/directory inclusion rule used for vendor files list generation. There are already some rules included (see src/FileFilters/) that You can use, or write Your own. Inclusion rules have higher priority than exclusions. However there is something tricky worth mentioning:

• By default, all content of the vendor/ directory is included.
• Excluding eg. path vendor-name/package-name will exclude content of this directory.
• Including vendor-name directory will override exclusion from above.
• Including vendor-name/package-name/subdirectory will not work, as vendor-name/package-name is already excluded (it is due to how RecursiveDirectoryIterator with RecursiveCallbackFilterIterator works). TODO for fixing in future :)
• Let's assume, that there is vendor-name/package-name/important_file.php. Including it will not work either.

setIncluded(\Donatorsky\VendorCompress\Contracts\FileFilterInterface[] $fileFilters)

Allows to set multiple file/directory inclusion rules at once. This overrides existing list of rules.

addFileProcessor(\Donatorsky\VendorCompress\Contracts\FileProcessorInterface $fileProcessor, \Donatorsky\VendorCompress\Contracts\FileFilterInterface $fileFilter, ...$moreFileFilters)

There are also file processors. They define some file content manipulations that should be performed before it is added to the archive. Eg. You can minify PHP code. It is possible to define multiple file rules to which content manipulation should be applied to.

Compression ratio comparison

Initial vendor/ size: 43.348 MiB

Number of files: 9664

Number of files after exclusions: 6992

Files \ Archive compression	NONE	GZ	BZ2
NONE	26.731 MiB (61.7%)	6.914 MiB (15.9%)	5.885 MiB (13.6%)
GZ	8.788 MiB (20.3%)	8.313 MiB (19.2%)	8.356 MiB (19.3%)
BZ2	8.517 MiB (19.6%)	7.947 MiB (18.3%)	7.957 MiB (18.4%)

Note: Only by removing docs and tests (mainly) the size of vendor decreases by ~38%.

TODO: Add some generation times to comparison above.

Exit codes

All exit codes constants can be found in bin/constants.php file.

Exit code	Name	Description
0	VENDOR_COMPRESS_ERR_OK	No error.
1	VENDOR_COMPRESS_ERR_UNSUPPORTED_PHP_VERSION	Returned when minimum PHP version requirement is not fulfilled.
2	VENDOR_COMPRESS_ERR_MISSING_PHAR_CLASS	Returned when \Phar class is missing.
3	VENDOR_COMPRESS_ERR_PROJECT_NOT_SET_UP	Returned when vendor directory could not be found or composer install is not performed.
4	VENDOR_COMPRESS_ERR_CANNOT_WRITE_PHAR_FILES	Returned when PHAR files writing is not allowed (according to https://secure.php.net/manual/en/phar.canwrite.php).
5	VENDOR_COMPRESS_ERR_MISSING_REQUIRED_OPTION_VALUE	Returned when command option is passed without its required value.
6	VENDOR_COMPRESS_ERR_UNKNOWN_OPTION	Returned when unknown command option is passed.
7	VENDOR_COMPRESS_ERR_UNKNOWN_ARGUMENT	Returned when unknown command argument is passed.
8	VENDOR_COMPRESS_ERR_MISSING_REQUIRED_ARGUMENT_VALUE	Returned when command argument is passed without its required value.
9	VENDOR_COMPRESS_ERR_COULD_NOT_DELETE_VENDOR_PHAR	Returned when vendor.phar.[.*] file could not be removed.
10	VENDOR_COMPRESS_ERR_COULD_NOT_CREATE_VENDOR_PHAR	Retuend when there is an error during Phar generation. The error message is sent to stderr.
11	VENDOR_COMPRESS_ERR_INACCESSIBLE_VENDOR_PATH	Returned when path to vendor directory is invalid or inaccessible.
12	VENDOR_COMPRESS_ERR_INACCESSIBLE_CONFIGURATION_FILE	Returned when specified configuration file could not be found or accessed.
13	VENDOR_COMPRESS_ERR_INVALID_CONFIGURATION_FILE	Returned when configuration file is invalid (i.e. it is not an instance of \Donatorsky\VendorCompress\Config class).

Tips for use

• The PHAR file tries to mount directories outside of the vendor/ directory and is currently only tested for paths directly one level above the vendor/ directory. If you rely in some way on paths from outside of the root directory of the project, autoload may not work.
• I think that the most useful would be to generate autoloading with the option --classmap-authoritative for production. To make autoloading from a PHAR file work, I rewrite the generated file indexes, so it may not work for dynamic file guessing and searching.
• Watch out when using whole archive compression. Although it provides better compression ratio, it also comes with additional hack for decompressing files (overrides custom stub.php script) which might break autoloading. Files compression is a bit more reliable here.

Plans for future

• Remove unnecessary whitespaces (a.k.a finish \Donatorsky\VendorCompress\FileProcessors\StripWhitespacesPhpFileProcessor)
• Maybe it is good idea to use symfony/console (originally it was used)?