Re: FFI in PHAR files

Ah, that makes total sense. I was worried I was doing something very wrong. haha Thank you very much for the detailed clarification. This doesn't seem to be a "critical" feature, but I wonder if the documentation shouldn't mention something about only "regular files" being supported. Vinicius Dias, Zend Certified Engineer, iMasters PHP Certified Professional Vinicius Dias, Zend Certified Engineer, iMasters PHP Certified Professional Em sex., 8 de set. de 2023 às 16:55, Bishop Bettini <bishop@php.net> escreveu: > > On Fri, Sep 8, 2023 at 2:33 PM Vinicius Dias <carlosv775@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 >