PHP pear.php.net is using a unsupported protocol – This should never happen.

Want to help support this blog? Try out Oh Dear, the best all-in-one monitoring tool for your entire website, co-founded by me (the guy that wrote this blogpost). Start with a 10-day trial, no strings attached.

We offer uptime monitoring, SSL checks, broken links checking, performance & cronjob monitoring, branded status pages & so much more. Try us out today!

Profile image of Mattias Geniar

Mattias Geniar, December 30, 2015

Follow me on Twitter as @mattiasgeniar

What an annoying and useless error. Here’s how to fix it, but there isn’t much to it.

You get the error when running this command.

$ pecl upgrade
pear.php.net is using a unsupported protocol - This should never happen.
upgrade failed

The fix? First upgrade the pear channels, then the pecl channels.

$ pear update-channels
$ pecl update-channels

Next, do a pear and pecl upgrade.

$ pear upgrade
... 
(may update a lot of pear packages)

$ pecl upgrade
Nothing to upgrade

It’s not clear to me why this is even an issue in the first place, but it apparently is.



Want to subscribe to the cron.weekly newsletter?

I write a weekly-ish newsletter on Linux, open source & webdevelopment called cron.weekly.

It features the latest news, guides & tutorials and new open source projects. You can sign up via email below.

No spam. Just some good, practical Linux & open source content.