Box

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1320 stars · 110 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Box is a fast, zero-configuration CLI application for building PHAR archives from PHP projects. It bundles application code into a single executable PHAR with features like code isolation, requirements checking, signature verification, and Docker support.

Use cases

• build a phar from my php cli application
• package a php project into a single executable file
• compile php app into phar with zero config
• verify the signature of an existing phar
• inspect contents of a phar file
• add a requirements checker to my phar
• distribute a php command-line tool as one file

When to choose

• you need to distribute a PHP CLI application as a single self-contained PHAR
• you want fast, mostly zero-config PHAR building with sensible defaults
• you need PHAR inspection, diffing, or signature verification tooling
• you want Git-tag-based versioning baked into your PHAR builds

When to avoid

• your project is a web application not meant to run as a standalone PHAR
• you need to package non-PHP binaries or cross-language executables
• you are on Box2 and cannot migrate - use the legacy box2 project instead

Facets

cli-tool · maturity active

build-tool cli compression developer-tools developer-tools cli php cross-platform phar php bundler packaging humbug command-line automation docker

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="box-project/box")