Getting PEAR to work on XAMPP (Apache/MySQL stack on Windows)

If you are using the portable XAMPP installation and Windows 7, and, like me have the version after they removed the XAMPP shell from the control panel none of the suggested answers here will do you much good as the packages will not install.

The problem is with the config file. I found the correct settings after a lot of trial and error.

Simply pull up a command window in the \xampp\php directory and run

pear config-set doc_dir :\xampp\php\docs\PEAR
pear config-set cfg_dir :\xampp\php\cfg
pear config-set data_dir :\xampp\php\data\PEAR
pear config-set test_dir :\xampp\php\tests
pear config-set www_dir :\xampp\php\www

you will want to replace the ':' with the actual drive letter that your portable drive is running on at the moment. Unfortunately, this needs to be done any time this drive letter changes, but it did get the module I needed installed.

You need to fix your include_path system variable to point to the correct location.

To fix it edit the php.ini file. In that file you will find a line that says, "include_path = ...". (You can find out what the location of php.ini by running phpinfo() on a page.) Fix the part of the line that says, "\xampplite\php\pear\PEAR" to read "C:\xampplite\php\pear". Make sure to leave the semi-colons before and/or after the line in place.

Restart PHP and you should be good to go. To restart PHP in IIS you can restart the application pool assigned to your site or, better yet, restart IIS all together.