How to get current working directory inside Phar?

Question

How can I getcwd() in a PHP script in a Phar archive when called from the console?

Consider this call:

/path/to/my/actual/cwd> php index.php

In this case, getcwd() will return /path/to/my/actual/cwd. Now we take the same script, put it in a Phar and call it like this:

/path/to/my/actual/cwd> php /path/to/my/phar/archive.phar

This time, getcwd() will return /path/to/my/phar as that is the current working directory of the Phar archive, but I did not call the archive from that directory, the console's cwd is different.

How can I get that?

Or even better, how can I force all scripts in the Phar to think their cwd is the console one?

Answer 1

This question is old, however I'll try to answer it...

Let's assume we have the following builder script for the Phar bundle
(called with php -dphar.readonly=0 build.php from CLI):

<?php
$phar = new Phar('bundle.phar');
$phar->startBuffering();
$phar->addFile('index.php');
$phar->setStub('<?php var_dump(["cwd" => getcwd(), "dir" => __DIR__]);
__HALT_COMPILER();');
$phar->stopBuffering();

The directory structure looks like the following:

app
├── other
└── phar
    ├── build.php
    └── bundle.phar

Being in directory /app/other and calling the Phar bundle actually shows the following with PHP 7.4:

cd /app/other
php /app/phar/bundle.phar

array(2) {
  ["cwd"]=>
  string(31) "/app/other"
  ["dir"]=>
  string(30) "/app/phar"
}

Thus, the Phar stub is the place to handle (or preserve) context like getcwd().