PharData::extractTo

Note that PHAR only supports extracting the 'ustar' variant of the tar archives.

Some systems (such as older versions of Mac OS X) generate the 'pax' format by default.

See here for more information:
http://php.net/manual/pl/phar.fileformat.tar.php

I'm unable to extract the first directory from a tar archive:
the destination dir remains empty,
no error is thrown

<?php
$tar = new \PharData('archive.tar');
if ($tar->current()->isDir()) {
                echo 'is_dir';
                $dir = $tar->current()->getPathname();
                $dir = basename($dir);
                $tar->extractTo('destination', $dir);
}
?>

the docs hint that the second param could be a name of file OR DIR to be extracted from the archive, is that really possible?

This is an example of how to decompress and unarchive a TAR.GZ file using Phar decompress() and extractTo() methods:

<?php
echo '<h1>TAR.GZ decompress</h1>';

$file_name = 'your_file.tar.gz';
$tar_file_name = str_replace('.gz', '', $file_name);
$dir_file_name = str_replace('.tar.gz', '', $file_name);

// decompress from gz and creates your_file.tar
$p = new PharData($file_name);
$p->decompress();

// unarchive from the tar to folder 'your_file'
$phar = new PharData($tar_file_name);
$phar->extractTo($dir_file_name);

echo '<h1>DONE</h1>';
?>