phar exclude directories when creating tar archive

Question

I want to create a tar archive in a PHP script using the built-in PharData class.

I want the tar archive to represent a directory so I thought of using PharData::buildFromDirectory() to do that. Unfortunately the directory also is a git repository and has a .git folder in it which is much bigger than the directory itself.

So I need to remove that .git directory (ideally also the .idea directory...) from the archive because it would bloat it unnecessarily.

What I tried so far:

• Using a regular expression to filter the directory out:

  $archive->buildFromDirectory("..", "@^(?!.git).+@");
  

  Which didn't work.

• Using PharData::delete(), but unfortunately that seems to only delete a file and not a directory.

So, what is the best way to do what I want?

Answer 1

The problem with your regex is that the full path of the file gets matched, not only the directory (basename). Thus you cannot filter out the .git directory itself.

Using a character class negation ([^.][^g][^i][^t]) does also not help because there are parts of the path that do match this regex, so the path matches anyway.

This means you can use positive matches only.

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You could use Phar::buildFromIterator and then use RecursiveFilterIterator to filter out the files. There you can define your own matching method that filters correctly.

Answer 2

I've seen the following used to exclude git directories using a negative lookahead:

$phar->buildFromDirectory(__DIR__, '/^((?!\.git).)*$/');