Viewing the results

After building the docs it's time to view them. There are a few choices:

• View how it would look online (the php/ folder, which uses the theme used by www.php.net)
• View the plain html (the html/ folder)
• View the single file plain html, which is around 20mb (the bightml.html file)
• And other formats that require additional setup to the build environment: chm, pdf and *nix man pages

These files are tightly integrated into www.php.net, so to simplest way to view them is to setup a phpweb mirror.

Note: These instructions likely don't work on Windows, but may, feel free to update them to do so (rsync alternative?)

So, the mirrors use the rsync command. The following will work and it disables downloading parts of the mirror (like all the distributed php source files):

$ rsync -avzC --timeout=600 --delete --delete-after \
    --exclude='manual/**' --exclude='distributions/**' --exclude='extra/**' --exclude='backend/notes/**' \
    rsync.php.net::phpweb /path/to/your/webroot/phpweb
$ ln -s /path/to/phd/php /path/to/your/webroot/phpweb/manual/en

Notes:

• Change /path/to/your/webroot/phpweb
• The 'ln -s' creates a symlink from your build directory to this location in the docroot
• The docroot will likely be setup as a new virtual host via the web server configuration file
• See also an example virtual host configuration here: http://www.php.net/mirroring.php#settings.
• Once the changes are made, restart the web server.

Do not place the contents of the html/ folder onto your webserver. Especially not if you are running apache2. Just browse to the folder in your favorite file manager and open the “index.html” file (or any page you are interested in viewing).

Is that really wise?