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 outlined below, 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.)
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.
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 similar) package if using such a system.
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 www.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 contacted us first 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 (www.)cc(x).php.net 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 can be a plus on your mirror. We provide some setup instructions for that.
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.
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:
/www/htdocs/phpweb/backend folder as mirror.gif, mirror.jpg or mirror.png.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!
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.
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:
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).
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!