Installing code quality tools as phar files

Composer is not the only possible way to add code quality tools to your project. In this section, we will show you to add the tools as phar files.

We already came across phar in the previous chapters. It stands for PHP Archive and can be considered a whole PHP project within a single file. Technically, it is a self-executable ZIP archive that contains the source code of the application plus all necessary dependencies as well. The big advantage is that the required code is available immediately after download, so you can instantly use any phar file right away without having to care about Composer or dependencies at all. Furthermore, phar files are supported by all modern PHP versions.

This makes the usage of phar files quite handy, as you can treat them like binaries. Usually, you can download the many PHP tools we introduced to you so far as phar files directly and place them in whatever directory you want. However, there is no unified...