Compressing tar files on MacOS?

[FASEOFMARS]

Hello,

I have been having some trouble trying to make modifications to applications, I am cloud based so I cannot access ftp. I am not sure I am re-compressing the tar files correctly the file size always seems to increase after I re-compress. 

And ideas? 

 

[Aiwa]

Applications aren’t tar files, per se. they are actually PHAR files packaged in the TAR format. Alterations of the format will likely corrupt the installer. 

[FASEOFMARS]

Even without making alterations im struggling to unpack and repack the files into a tar format, I keep getting that error message. 

[Aiwa]

Because you can’t unpack and repack. When you unpack the tar, you are dropping all of the PHAR meta data. 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHAR_(file_format)

I’ve got a PHP script that runs in my CI tool to build a PHAR from the raw app files in my git repos, but it’s built largely from IPS source and thus can’t be shared.