It’s time to install HttpArchive! So just as with Webpagetest, there’s some requirements for HttpArchive as well.

HttpArchive must run on a unix-based machine, as HttpArchive uses pcntl, a threading function in PHP currently available only on unix-based machines. For this guide I will be using Ubuntu.

The following will be needed on your machine:

  • Apache2+
  • PHP5 or above
  • MySQL
  • Subversion
  • pcntl (PHP)

Most of these can be installed with a package manager. However with pnctl, one must manually download the source, and either configure PHP with the pcntl argument, or compile and install the pcntl extension manually. I found an Ubuntu forum post from skout23 that explains a very easy way to install pcntl for Ubuntu users. However I’m sure aside from the package manager, BSD based Linux users can do the exact same thing: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=549953

Here’s the relevant code for Ubuntu users:

mkdir php
cd php
apt-get source php5
cd php5-(WHATEVER_RELEASE)/ext/pcntlphpize
./configure
make

And don’t forget to restart Apache afterward!

Once everything is configured properly, you can checkout the HttpArchive source from the googlecode repository:

http://httparchive.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/

In addition, unless you want to download the downloads folder (which contains over 1GB of data from the sites that HttpArchive tracks), it would be best to checkout non-recursively, then check out all other folders:

svn co -N http://httparchive.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ .
cd trunk
svn up images
svn up bulktest

Next, we will modify the settings.inc folder with the following information:

  • $gMysqlServer = “YOUR_SERVER”
  • $gMysqlDb = “YOUR_DATABASE”
  • $gMysqlUsername = “ACCOUNT_USERNAME”
  • $gMysqlPassword = “ACCOUNT_PASSWORD”

Finally, Apache needs to interpret the .js files with PHP before being served to the user. There exists a directive inside the .htaccess file in the root of the repository that already accounts for this. However, I had issues with this particular part, so I had to add the directive into the php.conf file under /etc/apache2/mods-enabled (you will need root permissions to modify this file):

<Filesmatch "(filmstrip|harviewer|interesting|interesting-images).js">SetHandler application/x-httpd-php</FilesMatch>

And you’ve configured HttpArchive! Unfortunately it won’t really work without any data, but we’ll talk about the final steps in part 4: Configuring the two to work with each other!