Enabling pear on an (as) Appliance Server
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Note: The authoritative source for this information can be found in the Plesk Administration Manual located on their site:

http://download1.sw-soft.com/Plesk/Plesk7.5/Doc/plesk-7.5r-admins-guide-html/apas02.html

Note: This article also will help solve the "Warning: open_basedir restrictions are in effect" errors.

Pear comes installed on your appliance server but to enable it on one of your domains you'll have to change the default open_basedir variable.  
To change the default of this variable you'll need root access which you can ask for in the account center if you don't already have it.  

Here's how to enable pear on a domain:

1) SSH into your Plesk machine as "root" and cd to the conf directory for the domain on which you want to enable pear.  Something like this
should work:

cd /home/httpd/vhosts/domain.com/conf/

where domain.com is substituted with your domain name.  

2) Create a file called vhost.conf with the following contents:

<Directory "/home/httpd/vhosts/domain.com/httpdocs">
     php_admin_value open_basedir "/home/httpd/vhosts/domain.com/httpdocs:/usr/share/pear:/tmp"
</Directory>

again substituting domain.com with your domain name.

*** Note *** If you want to switch off safe_mode on a per domain basis you can add the following line before </Directory>

php_admin_value safe_mode Off

*** Note *** If you are having open_basedir problems you should add the path of the directory you are trying to access after :/tmp like this:

php_admin_value open_basedir "/home/httpd/vhosts/domain.com/httpdocs:/usr/share/pear:/tmp:/path/to/new/directory/to/access/"

Or you can try turning off open_basedir completely like this:

php_admin_value open_basedir none

3) Reconfigure your webserver so it will look for your new vhost.conf file by doing this:

/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/websrvmng --reconfigure-vhost --vhost-name=domain.com

4) Finally you must restart apache, this can be done through Plesk or by executing the following commands:

/etc/init.d/httpd stop
/etc/init.d/httpd start

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