Pickle VS web-pecl

Not that I'm aware of. The closest project I am aware of is/was Pickle, was designed to replace just the commandline extension installer.

The only alternative for PECL is Pickle, but that thing was dormant for years. It looks like there has been some new development recently so let's hope it can replace PECL sometime in the future.

There's hope that composer will eventually manage PHP extension installation (pickle) but that's been stagnant.

I keep getting a 500 when trying to reach https://pecl.php.net/

The core package is offered as pre-compiled binary through Ports packages system. In addition, important softwares such as extensions, Composer and PECL libraries are available. So are frameworks such as NextCloud and Zabbix.

If you don't have the opportunity to use a package manager, you can still install it easily via PECL:

PHP has extensions (written in C) and libraries/packages (written in pure PHP). For extensions, the closest thing to a standard is PECL (though I believe many extension authors don't use it at all). For packages, there's Composer. You're most likely looking for the latter.

If you are using any PHP frameworks, you are probably already using one of these extensions. But if you are not, you can download them from PECL or their specific vendors - but most likely you have some in your php/ext folder and have to activate them in the php.ini-file. Active extensions are not limited to just the current project you are working on. They will be available for all projects where you are using the same PHP environment. This may seem like a lot of extra-resources brought in where they might not be needed. So why are these extensions not libraries instead, that can be brought in on project-basis?

Here is link number 1 - Previous text "1"