Php.net Is Down | Hacker News Reader

Php.net Is Down

php.net

49 pointssschueller52 comments

Maybe they saw the "php is deprecated" post from a few hours ago, and they were like

  > Oh, why no one told us? Everyone, thanks for the work, but that's it, the project is over. The webserver is now a minecraft server.

I'm no fan of PHP but let's give them a break. It's Sunday and while having the docs down is unfortunate this basically doesn't matter.

We had been able to download PHP documentation, including useful users' notes, since the dawn of time... Prudence.

Edit: In case this comes useful to some: I think this is a backup, https://docs.phplang.net/docs.php

Yes! I remember downloading this for working in an offline setup 20+ years ago.

Still, maybe getting rid of the mirrors program 5 years ago had its downsides:

https://derickrethans.nl/php-mirrors.html

As the PHP documentation is in git it's easy to have a up to date copy locally.

It's Sunday in the United States.

It's not Sunday everywhere.

I get you're trying to be a white knight of sort and protect the world from HN's american-centric view, but of the 215 world capitals it's currently Sunday in 195 of them and Monday morning in the rest, so...

Most people in Auckland are very probably still asleep. That they be the responsible maintainers - of a service which I understand is in Germany - is not impossible, just pretty far from the main bets.

https://github.com/php/web-php/issues/1163

It was reported 9 hours ago... and it's still down?

A week or two ago, the Haskell website was down for the greater part of a weekend.

Digging through Hacker News history, Haskell.org was periodically reported down between 7 and 14 years ago.

I suspect the volunteer resources behind language projects have half-hearted DevOps.

So the surprising thing to me is not that php.net is down for hours, but that people care to report it.

Are you seriously comparing a niche language almost nobody uses vs the language that runs the majority of websites?

If I understand it correctly the site is managed more like a hobby/private website.

There is no company behind with sys admin 24h support.

what about the PHP Foundation?

https://thephp.foundation/

I think you’re overstating the usage of Haskell.

Hardly everyone uses it.

Jokes aside, I think you’ll be surprised to learn that the DevOps effort for most official programming language resources are surprisingly alike, regardless of their popularity.

OTOH static sites are an obvious solution for high resilience, low effort devops, and low cost hosting.

They could decouple the comments section to a dynamic API + minimal client-side code. Even if the API and/or DB go down, all the pages of the site will keep working.

I would think reliability and uptime are high priorities for a language that could almost be considered critical infrastructure at this point... but what do I know.

502 Bad Gateway

Damn this ancient laptop. But my Packard Bell won’t connect either?!

2xx - All good

3xx - Somethings could be better

4xx - You did something wrong

5xx - Server did something wrong

Judging by this quick cheat-sheet I just created, this was not your fault :)

1xx - Rare novelty response code.

1xx - this is the websocket connection if you want to watch what it's doing

418 I'm a teapot seemed pretty novel the first few times.

I prefer I'm a coffeepot, but for some reason, there was a 404.

Coffee not found. Sorry, I already drank it.

1xx is the response code you try to ignore because it's really annoying to deal with properly (like when you receive a 100 response to a file upload, or even worse, a 101 with a protocol that isn't exactly what you expected, or a 103 which means more content comes later).

1xx response codes are crucial for things like WebSockets and HTTP/3 but they make the HTTP state machine more complex and many people writing manual HTTP requests are ill-prepared to deal with them.

This status page link from php account on mastodon

https://ohdear.app/status-page/php-infrastructure-status-pag...

Well, there goes my Sunday. I guess it’s off to the horse track instead.

I'm sure being on the frontpage of HN isn't helping much.

A good dose of healthy downtime is sometimes welcome.

Seemingly https://www.elektronauts.com/ (community for Elektron devices) is also down, coincident? AFAIK, Elektronauts is running Discourse, so Ruby, not PHP, so unlikely to be related that way.

But, I'd wager a bet on some DNS misconfiguration at some CDN or likewise, that both are using :)

Apples and bananas.

I haven't used PHP in years, but I always felt the user examples section made their docs better than the Python docs which are still somewhat wanting for common use case based examples.

Coincidence this happens after the 8.4 update? We'll see.

It's run by Nexcess.net (or was, the last time I checked). Wonder if the whole hosting service is down?

Everything looks fine

https://status.nexcess.net/

They also appear to be using some kind of "We have Cloudflare at home" solution

After latest PHP release, everyone started migrating their projects to PHP.

Yes,it's down.

its back online

yep. this checks out

Go learn Go. :)

When Go has something like PHP Composer and doesn't require 50 environment variables.

If they have used Ruby on Rails would never have happened.

Fake news.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42228816

And that’s important, because?

Some infrastructures are supposed to have extremely high uptimes.

Were this occasion frequent, you would not see these submissions.

I understand posting about outages of critical infrastructure (like us-east-1) or interactive websites. But this is a non-interactive website, whose only purpose is delivering text (PHP docs) and maybe some binaries. The few people working on PHP projects on a Sunday may not have access to the official docs for a while. But they can just hop onto the Wayback Machine and carry on with their work.

For the manual (of which, I insist, coders should have an offline copy - they have been available since forever and prudence dictates), there is a backup site, apparently, at

https://docs.phplang.net/docs.php

For the purpose of the submission, I guess some people are puzzled ("What happened?").

php.net runs the language's documentation. its not just a home page

When latency and pageload was in seconds instead of milliseconds, downloading the documentation as a Windows Help file improved my efficiency.

This is a "kids these days" post. Maybe in a few years "The connection to the data center hosting the 1000 GPUs that run the LLM I ask how to do stuff is down, I can't get any work done!"

I've been using PHP since 1999 and never downloaded the documentation locally.

There's absolutely nothing preventing anyone from downloading the docs. However, search engines won't return results from your local .hlp files and there are plenty of cases where the comments underneath a manual page give context for edge cases that wasn't necessarily described in the docs.

I personally rely on the local documentation in my IDE because I can't be bothered to continuously update my docs with the latest errata and additions.

Down for 10 hours... Not a good look. Nothing goes down for 10 hours unless incompetence is part of the sauce.

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