PHP PHAR archives and Debian
If you get blank pages and no error message when trying to access a PHAR archive on a Debian or Ubuntu server, this is probably Suhosin's fault as it doesn't allow execution of code from PHAR archives by default. To allow PHAR archives, just add this line to /etc/php5/conf.d/suhosin.ini:
suhosin.executor.include.whitelist="phar"