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UNiTE is a self–container PHAR file, an executable PHP application.
You can typically execute it by going into the directory where the
unite.phar file is stored and running
/path/to/php unite.pharwhere /path/to/php is the path to your
PHP CLI executable. Please keep in mind:
You need specific versions of PHP to run UNiTE. If the PHP version is too old or too new you will very likely receive an error from PHP.
You must use the PHP CLI executable. You cannot use the PHP CGI executable; the latter is only meant to be used to serve web applications and will not work with a command line application like UNiTE.
If you are on Linux or macOS you can chmod +x
unite.phar to make it executable. If you rename the file to
unite (without a phar extension) and put it in a
directory that's in your $PATH (typically
/usr/local/bin) you can call UNiTE by simply typing
unite instead of php
/path/to/unite.phar . To the best of our knowledge this is not
possible on Windows.
Please note that this will only work if running /usr/bin/env php -v returns something like this
PHP 8.1.10 (cli) (built: Sep 3 2022 12:09:27) (NTS)
Copyright (c) The PHP Group
Zend Engine v4.1.10, Copyright (c) Zend Technologies
with Zend OPcache v8.1.10, Copyright (c), by Zend Technologies
The part in bold is what is important. It is the literal text PHP
followed by the PHP version and something in parentheses. The version
must be one of the supported versions of PHP per the link above and you
MUST see cli between the parentheses. If this is not the
case continue using UNiTE using the /path/to/php
unite.phar command as explained above.
UNITE works against XML, JSON or YAML site definitions. They tell it what to do. Since version 4.0.0 there is only one way to use UNITE: running it against a single XML, JSON or YAML file. Please note that batch mode was deprecated in version 3.1 and has been removed since version 4.0. You can always use a for-loop in your command line shell's scripting language to achieve the same result.
Your CRON job needs to run the unite.phar
file with the path to the XML site definition for the site you want to
restore as its argument. A sample CRON command line looks like
this:
/usr/bin/php-cli /path/to/unite.phar /home/myuser/backups/mysite.xml
Keep in mind that scheduling of the CRON script is the responsibility of the user. This is customarily done through the Control Panel of your web server or through the crontab -e command on most Linux and *BSD systems.
If you are not sure how CRON jobs work, we advise you to consult the following third-party resources: