ServerBuddies Support Blog

Error: “PEAR: command not found”

If you build PHP with PEAR, and the script pear does not exist on your server, this is what happened:

At some point, /usr/local/bin/pear and/or /usr/bin/pear were manually removed.

The directories /usr/local/lib/php/.registry and/or /usr/lib/php/.registry exist.

During PHP’s make install, the existence of those .registry directories cause the PEAR shell archive to think PEAR is already installed, so it skips the remainder of the PEAR build. Therefore, the bin/ files are not rebuilt.

However, if you move or delete the .registry files so that the build will complete, you lose the data about PEAR modules installed on the system.

How to resolve this issue.

The best course of action is to download the PEAR tarball from http://pear.php.net/package/PEAR/download to obtain the bin/ that is missing on your server, and place it in the proper location on your system.

Reference : http://cpanel.net & http://pear.php.net/

Installing the PEAR package manager and Checking if PEAR works

When using PHP >= 4.3.0, the PEAR Package Manager is already installed unless one has used the ./configure option –without-pear.

Verifying command line tool

Both pear and pecl tools should be available everywhere on command line. For that to work, pear’s binary (bin) directory should be in your PATH variable.

To verify it works, simply type pear. A list of commands should be shown:

You should further test that PEAR is up to date: