php manual on your hdd

One of the strong points of PHP is its well annotated online manual, which is peppered with useful code snippets and hints. How many times have you pointed your browser to php.net/manual/ to look up that at-the-tip-of-your-mouth function's argument list ? If you or your company use the manual frequently, it might be a good idea to mirror the manual in your internal network. I have mirrored the manual in my office, and the two benefits that I see are

• Faster manual lookup - Living in a bandwidth starved country(India), this is a major win for us.
• A peek at well written code, again a major win if you are always looking for new and nifty way for doing things

The process of how to go about mirroring the manual is surprisingly well documented at Mirroring The PHP Website. As suggested by the documentation, You may want to exclude out certain non essential things ,like the manual in different languages. I also excluded the tar.gz and the zip files in the extra directory.

After downloading the manual pages, I created the virtual host (a simple copy-paste with some minor modifications) for the manual and that was it. To keep the manual uptodate I run the rsync command once a week.

For the record, my rsync command is rsync -avzC --timeout=600 --delete --delete-after --include='manual/en/' --include='manual/en/**' --exclude='manual/**' --exclude='distributions/manual/**' --exclude='distributions/*.exe' --exclude='extra/*.zip' --exclude='extra/*.tar*' --exclude='distributions/*' rsync.php.net::phpweb ./ Of course, you will need to change this to suit your needs.