I had a heck of a time getting PEAR2’s pyrus.phar 2.0.0a3 running. I downloaded pyrus.phar, ran ‘php pyrus.phar list-packages’ and got nothing.
Turns out the problem was having Suhosin installed as well. Once I added:
suhosin.executor.include.whitelist=”phar”
… to my php.ini directives, ‘php pyrus.phar list-packages’ gave me a list of packages.
I always forget this, but the trick is always remember: if it doesn’t work for some reason, check suhosin settings. Make sure you have suhosin logging turned on, and check the log!