The Apache Software Foundation has mirror sites from all around the world, but we are always looking for more reliable and well connected sites that can help us distribute our software. We no longer encourage mirrors of the various Apache Software Foundation websites, since they have become too complicated to easily replicate. Instead, we request mirrors that can aid in distributing the software itself by mirroring our main software distribution directory.

We have a few requirements for those wishing to run a mirror:

• At least 10 GB of available disk space. The current site is around 1.7 GB, but we wish to leave room for considerable expansion.
• You must carry the complete site, with no "local" changes.
• You must do an update-check at least once a day.
• You must subscribe to the mailing list for mirror maintainers.

Further, we request that you run your mirroring software between midnight and 4am Pacific Standard Time (8am-noon GMT) when traffic to www.apache.org is at its lowest.

In addition, we strongly recommend that you run the Apache HTTP Server version 1.3.26 or 2.0.43 or later and use the following configuration for your web mirror to allow all the features of our download site to function optimally:

<Directory /path/to/mirror>
  IndexOptions FancyIndexing NameWidth=* FoldersFirst \
     ScanHTMLTitles DescriptionWidth=*
  HeaderName HEADER.html
  ReadmeName README.html
  AllowOverride FileInfo Indexes
  Options Indexes SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
</Directory>

If you do not wish to add FollowSymlinks or SymLinksIfOwnerMatch to your Apache configuration, please use the -L option instead of the -l option on the rsync command line below.

There are a couple different ways to mirror the Apache Software Foundation software distributions. Here is the list of ways we make available. We strongly recommend that you use rsync. Other techniques may or may not work.

rsync

You can find details on rsync at http://rsync.samba.org/. You might want to call it using the following arguments, for example:

rsync -rtlzv --delete --exclude incoming www.apache.org::apache-dist /local/path/to/mirror

You can also just do a rsync www.apache.org:: to get a list of rsync modules available.

CVSup

This is a package which uses the versioning scheme in CVS to determine exactly which parts of which files changed between accesses, and is thus by far the most efficient mechanism for transferring CVS-related files. The best place to find out more about CVSup is at the CVSup FAQ. There are binaries for Linux, *BSD, Solaris, SunOS, Alpha/OSF-1, HPPA-10.20, and Irix 6.

After you've set up the client binary, use the following as a "supfile":

*default host=www.apache.org
*default base=(wherever you want)
*default prefix=(wherever you want)
*default release=cvs
apache-fullsite

Other Techniques

We do not recommend the use of Web spiders, or HTTP equivalents to the "mirror.pl" package, as every object needs to get a HEAD request every time it is checked, which is a very inefficient mechanism for seeing what's been updated on an entire site.

It is not possible to mirror via ftp. The other methods are also far more efficient so you will be pleased after setting them up.

Once the site is set up, subscribe to the mirror maintainters mailing list by sending mail to "mirrors-subscribe@apache.org", and then send a message to that list giving the details of your mirror (including the country where it is located).

Good luck!