This page describes the requirements and an ideal strategy for mirroring
Apache Software Foundation releases. More information can be obtained from
the infrastructure@apache.org mailing list.
Any project willing to use the ASF infrastructure to distribute source,
binary and documentation builds must adhere to the following guidelines.
These guidelines have been developed so that a consistent way to mirror our
distributions can be achieved, therefore lowering the impact of the enormous
amount of bandwidth consumed by our downloads.
Software distributions should not be kept on the project's website.
Instead, they should be moved to the appropriate central site. There
are three types of software distributions with three different
locations:
- Current public releases: http://www.apache.org/dist/
- Current, official releases that have been approved by the PMC
and are targetted at end-users should be
placed on www.apache.org. This is the main public release site and
the site that is mirrored world-wide.
[minotaur.apache.org:/www/www.apache.org/dist/]
- Non-public releases: http://svn.apache.org/
- Releases that are not intended for general public consumption
should be placed on people.apache.org. This includes automated test
builds (svn.apache.org/builds/) and pre-releases aimed at the
developer community, but not at end users (svn.apache.org/dist/).
Essentially, any release that you do not consider ready for prime
time should go here.
[people.apache.org:/www/cvs.apache.org/]
- Old releases: http://archive.apache.org/dist/
- Older releases that you would no longer recommend to the general
public should be placed on archive.apache.org. This site
automatically contains all the content of www.apache.org/dist/, but
nothing is ever deleted. Therefore it should rarely be necessary to
touch this site, except during a reorganization. Once a release is no
longer recommended to the public, simply delete it from
www.apache.org/dist/, and it will remain on archive.apache.org/dist/.
[minotaur.apache.org:/www/archive.apache.org/dist/]
Do not point your download links directly at www.apache.org.
Instead, point these links at the mirrors. Also note that you should wait
around 24 hours between placing your files in the download directories and
sending out announcements with links to the mirrors. This is the time
necessary for the majority of mirrors to grab the files.
Read these instructions thoroughly before configuring your project mirror.
See also the
ASF
and
Ant
Step-By-Step guides to mirroring, and the excellent mirroring, PGP and MD5
resources by Henk. Review how
other ASF projects do their mirrors.
The HTTP Server project is using the following system to achieve its
mirroring goals. Please see it in action at http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi.
This page uses a templating system that replaces links of the form
<a href="[preferred]/httpd/">link</a> with
<a href="http://www.apache.org/dist/httpd/">link</a>.
Please look at the source for the download.xml page. Please pay attention to the [location], [preferred],
[http], [ftp], [backup] tags.
An alternative that is quicker to setup, but less elegant, is to
use the http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi script. This script understands the
PATH_INFO environment variable which can be used to point to particular
directories on the mirrors. For example, http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/httpd/docs/ points to
documentation distributions for the HTTP Server project.
Read this for more information
on creating download pages.
If you are unable to wait 24 hours before announcing your release,
then you can pass a date and time to the download script to indicate
that only mirrors that have updated since that time should be
selected. This works by adding update=YYYYMMDDhhmm to
the query string. For example, you can use
http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi?update=200407051415
to request only mirrors that have updated after 2:15pm on July 5, 2004
Pacific time. Please use this option sparingly, since it can result
in excessive load on particular mirrors. It would be appropriate, for
example, in an emailed release announcement for an important security
release, but should not usually be used as a main website link.
If you have any questions or comments, please email the
infrastructure@apache.org mailing list or have a look at the
ASF
and Ant
Step-By-Step guides to mirroring.
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