Mirroring The PHP Website

If you would like to participate in the official PHP mirrors program,

please read and follow these instructions carefully. You should have

the consent of your hosting company (if you aren't a hosting company

yourself), and be prepared for some potentially significant bandwidth

usage. As of 25 September, 2013, the network of mirrors is averaging

251GB per day (about 7.52TB per month). At the time of the updating

of this page, this load was spread across 90 active mirrors, indicating

an overall average of 2.9GB per mirror. This can go up to 12GB per

day or more for busy mirrors, such as those in the US, UK, and India.

And immediately following new releases of PHP, the traffic spikes even

higher (as should be expected) due to a surge in the number of downloads.

Please be sure your server or hosting account is able to handle a minimum

of roughly 42 gigabytes of transfer each month without incurring any

additional costs or penalties, as the mirrors with the fewest requests

per month are still averaging this amount of bandwidth usage per month.

In the event that such action is taken against your account, remember:

it is your responsibility.

Official mirror program participants are required to use PHP 5.3.21 or

greater, but please note that we encourage maintainers to always use the

latest stable versions of actively-developed branches. Please note that

we do, somewhat regularly (about once per year) require existing

maintainers to upgrade their PHP versions to a new minimum, so always

being proactive in upgrades will ensure that your mirror remains in

compliance with the official mirrors program. Set it up as an Apache

module with the settings , or in

any other Apache connected way (CGI, FastCGI, etc), considering the

requested PHP settings outlined below in the Apache vhost instructions.

The size of the full website is approximately 4.7 gigabytes.

NOTE: Some of our maintainers prefer to use web servers other

than Apache, such as Nginx.

While this is permitted (as long as everything ultimately works as

directed), we do not officially support these setups at this time.

If you would like to learn how to set up an alternative environment,

feel free to post a question to current mirror maintainers on the

mailing list at php-mirrors@lists.php.net.

Applications to join the official mirror program are reviewed on a

case-by-case basis, but we will only approve those from ISPs and web

hosting providers; universities and state-recognized academic institutions;

PHP-centric web development firms; and PHP user groups and individual

enthusiasts. Under no circumstances will we even review applications from

marketing firms, website portals or directories, or anything of

questionable moral or legal standing. We also reserve the right, at our

discretion, and without warning, to refuse any application for any reason,

or to suspend or expell any active mirrors if it is discovered that any

information on the application was false or otherwise incorrect, or if

the mirrors fails to remain in compliance with the official mirrors program.

Please note that we are currently only accepting new applications for

countries in which we don't already have two official mirror presences.

For a list of active official mirrors, see mirrors.php.

Prior to attempting to set up an official mirror site, you are advised to contact php-mirrors@lists.php.net (a public

mailing list, archived in numerous places on the Internet) to inquire as to

whether or not your application may be accepted. We have found that this limit

serves our users well, so please do not ask to provide a third mirror for a country

that already has two. Please also be aware that the mirror is required to be

physically located in the country you would like to serve. If there are already

two mirrors in a country for which you would like to provide an official mirror,

you may add your information to the official waiting list, which can be found

here. If and when

a vacancy becomes available, we will go through the applications on the waiting

list before entertaining new public applications.

If you are not an official mirror (e.g. you mirror the site for your company's

internal use), you should not synchronize from our network more frequently

than once every six hours, or you may find your IP blocked. Also, please make

an effort to only mirror those parts of the site that you actually need.

(For example, exclude the manual in all languages that you

will not be using and exclude the distributions directory.)

Get Files With Rsync

First, you need to have a rsync

installed. To better serve our official mirror providers and maintainers,

we switched to a geographically-decentralized distribution architecture. By

switching from a single United States-based master server to three Regional

Rsync Nodes (RRNs), we're able to reduce the amount of latency and time to

transfer data between an RRN and a mirror, serve more requests per hour

(allowing for a closer to real-time network update globally), and provide

redundancy in the event of an outage of a sync server.

To synchronize your server with the appropriate RRN, first view the coverage map

and identify which RRN your mirror should be using. Next, modify the

following code for use with your mirror. Replace YOUR_RRN_HOSTNAME

with your RRN's hostname as indicated by the coverage map and be sure to

change /your/local/path with the path to where your php.net

mirror will reside on the filesystem.

    rsync -avzC --timeout=600 --delete --delete-after \




      --include='distributions/*.exe' \




      YOUR_RRN_HOSTNAME::phpweb /your/local/path 

Setting up an unofficial mirror, and want to only mirror one

language of the manual? Add:

    --include='manual/en/' --include='manual/en/**' --exclude='manual/**' --exclude='distributions/manual/**'

after "--delete-after" in the command line above (substituting your

prefered language code in place of 'en'). You can also exclude the

whole distributions directory (and the related extra folder) by replacing

"--exclude='distributions/manual/**'" with

"--exclude='distributions/**' --exclude='extra/**'".

Official PHP mirror sites should provide the exact content coming from our servers,

and must not be altered in any way unless explicitly stated in the mirroring

guidelines. Failing to do will result in immediate termination and permanent

expulsion of your participation in the program.

Add SQLite 3 Support

SQLite is an embedded

SQL database implementation that has very high performance for applications

with low write concurrency. PHP mirrors currently employ SQLite for URL

shortcut lookups, and it is a requirement of all official mirrors to have

it installed and available to PHP.

There are a couple of SQLite 3 implementations in PHP. One is via the

PDO extension by using the SQLite driver (pdo_sqlite, which is required).

The other is via the SQLite3 extension. These extensions are both compiled

into PHP by default. Note: Some Linux distributions disable many extensions

in their package systems, including SQLite. Please make sure you install the

"php5-sqlite" (or similiar) package if using such a system.

Setup Apache VirtualHost

Make sure your web server is set up to serve .php files as PHP

parsed files. If it isn't, add the MIME type to your config.

Please make sure you have turned off output compression for binary files.

Create a VirtualHost entry, which looks something like:

<VirtualHost *-or-your-hostname-or-your-ip-here>




     <Directory /www/htdocs/phpweb>




          # Do not display directory listings if index is not present,




          # and do not try to match filenames if extension is omitted




          Options -Indexes -MultiViews




     </Directory>









     ServerName ccx.php.net




     ServerAlias cc.php.net http://www.zjjv.com/x.php.net http://www.zjjv.com/.php.net the.cname.you.set.up.example.com




     ServerAdmin yourname@example.com




     UseCanonicalName On




     




     # Webroot of PHP mirror site




     DocumentRoot /www/htdocs/phpweb




     




     # Log server activity




     ErrorLog logs/error_log




     TransferLog logs/access_log




     




     # Set directory index




     DirectoryIndex index.php index.html




     




     # Handle errors with local error handler script




     ErrorDocument 401 /error.php




     ErrorDocument 403 /error.php




     ErrorDocument 404 /error.php




     




     # Add types not specified by Apache by default




     AddType application/octet-stream .chm .bz2 .tgz .msi




     AddType application/x-pilot .prc .pdb 









     # Set mirror's preferred language here




     SetEnv MIRROR_LANGUAGE "en"









     # The next two lines are only necessary if generating




     # stats (see below), otherwise you should comment them out




     Alias /stats/ /path/to/local/stats/




     SetEnv MIRROR_STATS 1









     # Apache2 has 'AddHandler type-map var' enabled by default.




     # Remove the comment sign on the line below if you have it enabled.




     # RemoveHandler var




     




     # Turn spelling support off (which would break URL shortcuts)




     <IfModule mod_speling.c>




       CheckSpelling Off




     </IfModule>









     # A few recommended PHP directives




     php_flag display_errors off




     




     # If you have Russian Apache with mod_charset installed,




     # do not forget to search for this line in your existing




     # configuration, and comment it out:




     # AddHandler strip-meta-http .htm .html 




         




</VirtualHost>

You should only start to set up an Apache VirtualHost for an official

mirror if you have and received

the permanent names for your mirror. The names for all official PHP mirrors

are in the convention: ccx.php.net, where cc

stands for the 2-letter ISO country code of your mirror's location and

x is an incremental identifier for the mirrors of that country.

Do not assume that you know the code you will receive until your application

has been reviewed and approved, and do not submit an application saying, for

example, "We are applying to become DE1.PHP.NET." It's possible that the

mirror already exists, but is experiencing issues that have it temporarily

removed from active rotation, and delisted from the roster of mirrors. We do

not want anyone to waste their time only to have their application altered

or rejected. The mirrors should also listen for the cc.php.net

hostname, as we moved to providing a simple load-balancing solution:

round-robin DNS.

All mirrors are required to be configured for both CC and CCX, so any active

mirror can receive traffic for their respective cc.php.net

hostname, thus providing redundancy and improved uptime for visitors.

Before adding new official mirrors to our DNS, we require the maintainers

to set up the mirrors with an address we can use as a CNAME in the DNS.

This subdomain (the.cname.you.set.up.example.com in the above

example) will be checked by mirror admins before the mirror is added.

Therefore it is important that the mirror is capable of serving requests

for this name and the (http://www.zjjv.com/ address provided by the

mirror administrators.

The hostname you provide to us must be a configured hostname to be entered

into our DNS as a CNAME, not an IP address to be used as an A record. Your

local DNS information may then translate into both IPv4 and IPv6, should

you so desire and have the capabilities, but may not exclude IPv4 from the

record until further notice.

When setting up the vhost, provide an asterisk, a hostname, or an IP

address in the VirtualHost container's header (depending on whether

you would like to make the vhost work for all IPs handled by Apache,

or just a specific hostname/IP address). Consult

the Apache

documentation for the differences of the two methods. It is very

important to use your ccx.php.net address as the ServerName, so

URL redirections will keep the requests in the php.net domain, ensuring

that the My PHP.net service will work. Failure to do so will also cause

your mirror to show up as an unofficial mirror, and to be removed from the

roster page.

Change the DocumentRoot setting as appropriate,

specify the mirror's preferred language, and provide settings according

to your stats setup, if your mirror is going to provide stats. For the

preferred language setting, choose one from those available as

manual translations. If you provide something else, your default

language will be English. After you restart Apache, your mirror

site should start working.

Setting Up Local Stats

Setting up local stats can be a plus on your mirror. We

provide some setup

instructions for that.

Setup Regular Updates

You must also set up a cron job that periodically does an rsync to

refresh your web directory. We prefer that all mirrors update from

the appropriate RRN from the coverage map every five minutes, to

speed up the distribution of updates to the site and available packages.

Something like:

   */5 * * * * rsync -avzC --timeout=600 --delete --delete-after --include='distributions/*.exe' YOUR_RRN_HOSTNAME::phpweb /your/local/path

Remember to specify the same rsync parameters you used to get the

phpweb files as explained near the top of this page.

If you're unable to synchronize every five minutes, you may pick

your own update frequency, provided it does not exceed fifteen

minutes.

Sponsor Logo

We would like to thank you for providing a mirror, so

if you would like to display a logo on the mirror site promoting your

company, you are able to do so by following these steps:

The PHP Group and the Network Infrastructure Manager reserve the

right to refuse images based on content, but most things should be fine.

We have chosen a banner size which conforms with the

Internet

Advertising Bureau standards.

And finally, don't forget to put a nice little PHP logo somewhere

on your hosting company's site if possible. Grab one of the logos

from the logos download page, and

link it to your mirror. This shows the community that you are a

proud supporter of PHP and open source technology, and you will be

worshipped every hour, on the hour, in song and dance, by millions of

proboscis monkeys

the world over. Well, okay, perhaps not.... but folks will certainly

appreciate your generosity and support!

Mirror Setup Troubleshooting

The mirror troubleshooting guide

contains information about the common and potential problems discovered

when setting up and maintaining a PHP.net mirror. Included are links that

perform many of the tests executed by the automated mirror management tools.

Data Registered About Official Mirrors

Once you have done the above and your site appears to work, send a message

to php-mirrors@lists.php.net

with the following information, and appropriate steps will be taken to

integrate your mirror site:

Your country.

The ccx.php.net address you used to set up the mirror site, which

you obtained previously in a conversation with the mirror admins.

Your name and email address to be registered as the admin of the mirror.

A hostname that we can use as a CNAME for the country-code-based

name of the mirror (the.cname.you.set.up.example.com in the

above setup example). Using a name means you can move the mirror to

another IP address without coordinating with us at all (though, obviously,

it must still be in the country you intend to serve).

Whether or not you've installed local stats support on your mirror.

The name of the sponsor approved previously by mirror program staff.

The URL of the sponsor. This link is provided with the sponsor's name

at the bottom of pages, with the sponsor image on the front page and

in the mirror listing.

There is a mailing list named "php-mirrors" at

lists.php.net, to which you are required to subscribe.

This mailing list is very low-traffic and only used for communication

between mirror maintainers and php.net webmasters, and to provide

automatic information on mirror outages and other issues.

To subscribe send an empty message

to: php-mirrors-subscribe@lists.php.net

We also operate an EFNet channel, and encourage you to join us there.

If you are interested, please join us at #php.mirrors.

Many maintainers and staff members idle in the room around the clock,

and are available to address questions, concerns, or issues in

real-time (keeping in mind that the mailing list is the official

support channel, and this is just a convenient additional method of

communication between teams).

Thank you for your interest in providing a mirror! If you ever have any

questions or concerns, drop us a line at

php-mirrors@lists.php.net

--- we are here to help!