Installation notes

Regular PEAR installation

The preferred method to install Phing is through PEAR and the Phing PEAR channel. You can install Phing by adding the pear.phing.info channel to your PEAR environment and then installing Phing using the phing channel alias and phing package name:

$> pear channel-discover pear.phing.info
$> pear install [--alldeps] phing/phing

Non-PEAR installation

Make sure that the file bin/phing (non-Windows) or bin\phing.bat (Windows) is located on your PATH.

XAMPP

The following problem might occur when using XAMPP 1.7.2 (other versions haven't been tested or reported):

I have a build.xml file (attached) which works fine if it lies in C:\xampp and doesn't work if it lies in C:\xampp\htdocs

The error which occurs is "Can't locate default task list"

It seems that, in some cases, the XAMPP install saves an incorrect, relative path as the PEAR data_dir setting (such as ".\php\data"), making it unreachable from other directories than the base XAMPP installation directory. To remedy this, use pear config_set data_dir ... to edit the setting, and re-install the Phing package.

Another temporary fix is to add the pear/data directory to your include_path:

<< include_path = ".;D:\xampp\php\PEAR"
>> include_path = ".;D:\xampp\php\PEAR;D:\xampp\php\PEAR\data"

More information is available here:  ticket #376.