On Fri, Sep 8, 2023 at 2:33 PM Vinicius Dias <carlosv...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I was playing around with some libraries using FFI and I wanted to > share a .phar with the result, but to my surprise, it didn't work. > > Apparently we are not able to load shared libraries using FFI from > within .phar files. > Is that the expected behavior or is it a bug in the FFI extension? > > I have setup a dummy repo so the error could be easily reproduced: > https://github.com/CViniciusSDias/ffi-phar-problem > > I am sorry if this is not the list to send this type of problem. I > will gladly move the thread to the right one if someone points it out. > https://www.php.net/unsub.php Erstwhile PHAR extension maintainer here. What an interesting question! The short answer is no, FFI does not support loading dynamic libraries contained within a PHAR archive. The longer answer is that FFI was not written to be able to support VFS locations, including the phar:// scheme. In this case, PHP starts and invokes the code. The code invokes FFI[1] with a phar:// path, which then tries to perform a dlopen()[2], which fails because dlopen has no idea how to resolve PHAR paths: dlopen() expects a path that the OS can resolve[3]. I suppose it'd be possible to improve FFI to call the PHP VFS layer to resolve a path, which would handle the phar:// scheme and other schemes. But, I would be worried about potential other downstream impacts - esp. security implications - as this is a novel (to me at least) scenario. bishop [1]: https://github.com/php/php-src/blob/50ca24251d97dbf78b0c1165dac7c1a19ff1c87a/ext/ffi/ffi.c#L2968C3-L2968C3 [2]: https://github.com/php/php-src/blob/50ca24251d97dbf78b0c1165dac7c1a19ff1c87a/Zend/zend_portability.h#L156 [3]:https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/dlopen.3.html
