Anyone who has worked with Composer for PHP package management knows that it's been one of the biggest changes in the PHP ecosystem in recent years. Unfortunately, it does have one major potential downfall - it's reliance on GitHub. While GitHub usually does a good job of staying stable, even they falter from time to time. Thankfully there's a locally hosted alternative you can use - Satis. In this new post to NetTuts.com, they show you how to use this tool and mirror packages for your own use.

In this tutorial we will set up a local mirror to proxy all your packages required in your project’s composer.json file. This will make our CI work much faster, install the packages over the local network or even hosted on the same machine, and make sure we have the specific versions of the packages always available.

They start with a look at what Satis is and how it fits into the whole Composer installation process. From there, they show how to get it installed (via Composer) and using a "mirrored-packages.conf" configuration file to point to the repositories. They include the steps to get it up and running in Apache and show a simple command to get the latest versions for the mirrored packages (perfect for a cron job). There's also some testing included there at the end, parsing and validating the configuration file.

On the VG Tech blog today there's a post that show you a way to reduce your dependencies on Composer (using Github) without sacrificing the use of the tool.

Composer is the defacto standard dependency manager for PHP out there, also here in VG. [...] For the most parts it has been a pleasant experience, but it creates a hard dependency towards external sources as we now require these sources to be available when updating/installing. [...] Since we use Composer for all our internal packages, we already had Satis set up, which basically is a package repository builder for Composer.

They include their Satis configuration and link to more information about the archive feature to bring a mirror of the repo in-house easily. There's also an example of the "require" section that defines the packages and version numbers you're expecting.

New on the Zend Developer Zone today is an article from Shahar Evron about mirroring Zend Server repositories to re-serve them out, either to a different community or as a part of your internal processes.

There are several good reasons to mirror a Linux repository, be it the Zend repositories or any other repository. The most simple reason is sheer performance: if you need to install Zend Server on a number of machines, you can save a lot of valuable time by creating a local mirror of the repositories, and using that mirror as your installation source for all servers.

He also points out that it can save on bandwidth used - pulling from local will always be more efficient. It also gives you more control about exactly what software is installed on your servers. He breaks the mirroring process up into four steps (with a few added helpful hints at the end):

• Copy the Zend Server repository to a local machine
• Local Repository Test
• Enable network access to your local repository
• Configure clients to use your local repository

On the Symfony project blog there's a recent post from <>Fabien Potencier about the popular framework's development and source moving to a new home - github.

As you might have noticed if you follow me on Twitter (which you should do as I make a lot of small announcements there), or if you monitor the Subversion activity closely, the Symfony 2 code is now hosted on Git. [...] So, from now on, all the development activity for Symfony 2 will take place on the new Git repository.

He briefly covers what git is and a resource (book) he used to help understand this recently popular version control system. If you don't want to learn a new version control system but still want to contribute back with the subversion knowledge you're already armed with, you can still use their svn mirror to get the latest releases.

Following some issues with the Phing and Propel subversion repositories for Symfony, Fabien Potencier has made a few changes to aid in their future stability.

The Phing and Propel Subversion repositories have suffered from long downtime periods quite often recently (last one was today). It is quite annoying as when it happens, you cannot easily update your symfony repositories, let alone the checkout of a symfony branch. To make things worse, the Doctrine repository also had some problems recently. A lot of symfony users are quite upset by the situation, myself being the first one.

The solution - create some mirrors to provide more than one source to fetch the latest checkouts from. Here's the list of the new resources: Phing mirror, Propel mirror, Doctrine mirror.

Jaisen Mathai has a helpful hint for those that do any offline work with PHP on their own development systems - how to mirror the PHP manual on a local web server.

In addition to [a local copy of your source] being faster to develop, it lets you work without needing to be connected to the Internet. But what about the tools you use while developing? If you’re a PHP developer then the manual at php.net is an invaluable tool. It only make sense to have it available for when you’re not online.

His example follows the official mirroring part of the PHP.net website and uses a slightly modified rsync command to fetch the manual information from the php.net site and drops it in a location locally. He throws in an Apache configuration too for a simple VirtualHost to get it up and running.

As Greg Beaver mentions in his latest blog entry, the main website for PEAR, pear.php.net has been mirrored as part of an effort to restructure and "revamp" the PEAR wesbite.

I'm excited to announce the first two mirrors of pear.php.net are now actively mirroring the installer REST files and actual .tgz files of package releases. They are http://us.pear.php.net (provided by Joshua Eichorn and bluga.net) and http://de.pear.php.net (provided by Christian Weiske). The option exists at a future date of mirroring the entire website, but this will not be possible without further changes to the infrastructure.

Using these servers is only slightly different than the main site, setting the preferred_mirror setting in your configuration to use one of the above.

As Greg Beaver mentions in his latest blog entry, the main website for PEAR, pear.php.net has been mirrored as part of an effort to restructure and "revamp" the PEAR wesbite.

I'm excited to announce the first two mirrors of pear.php.net are now actively mirroring the installer REST files and actual .tgz files of package releases. They are http://us.pear.php.net (provided by Joshua Eichorn and bluga.net) and http://de.pear.php.net (provided by Christian Weiske). The option exists at a future date of mirroring the entire website, but this will not be possible without further changes to the infrastructure.

Using these servers is only slightly different than the main site, setting the preferred_mirror setting in your configuration to use one of the above.

As Greg Beaver mentions in his latest blog entry, the main website for PEAR, pear.php.net has been mirrored as part of an effort to restructure and "revamp" the PEAR wesbite.

I'm excited to announce the first two mirrors of pear.php.net are now actively mirroring the installer REST files and actual .tgz files of package releases. They are http://us.pear.php.net (provided by Joshua Eichorn and bluga.net) and http://de.pear.php.net (provided by Christian Weiske). The option exists at a future date of mirroring the entire website, but this will not be possible without further changes to the infrastructure.

Using these servers is only slightly different than the main site, setting the preferred_mirror setting in your configuration to use one of the above.

As Greg Beaver mentions in his latest blog entry, the main website for PEAR, pear.php.net has been mirrored as part of an effort to restructure and "revamp" the PEAR wesbite.

I'm excited to announce the first two mirrors of pear.php.net are now actively mirroring the installer REST files and actual .tgz files of package releases. They are http://us.pear.php.net (provided by Joshua Eichorn and bluga.net) and http://de.pear.php.net (provided by Christian Weiske). The option exists at a future date of mirroring the entire website, but this will not be possible without further changes to the infrastructure.

Using these servers is only slightly different than the main site, setting the preferred_mirror setting in your configuration to use one of the above.