No longer using PHAR. Due to problems in a small but not insignificant number of hosts, we decided to abandon PHAR as the delivery format for the Kickstart application. We are going back to the single PHP file approach we were using up until Kickstart 8. New features introduced in Kickstart 9, such as the improved support for S3v4, custom S3 endpoints, security precautions about file naming, password protection, and PHP 8.5 compatibility have of course been kept going into version 9.1.
Easier CLI usage.
Running Kickstart from the command line no longer requires renaming the file to restore.php or setting a password. You can now run it directly as kickstart.php from the CLI without any preconditions.