What is CVS?

You can find more information about CVS, and download clients for most major platforms, at the CVS Wiki.

CVS mirroring

You can also mirror the PHP CVS repository using CVSup, see our CVSup page for more details.

Contribute

If you would like to join PHP development or would like to contribute to the PHP documentation, contact the relevant group. You will need your own CVS account to contribute.

Source and binary snapshots

You may also be interested in a PHP snapshot, see snaps.php.net. Compiled snapshots for Windows users are also included.

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Anonymous CVS Access

If you wish to get the latest PHP source tree, you can obtain it through anonymous CVS. You should be warned that the CVS version is a development version, and as such, is often unstable, and may not even compile properly. The advantage of using CVS, though, is that you can get the latest fixes and updates, without having to wait for the official releases.

PHP uses an advanced configuration system that requires you to have the following tools. Re2c is only necessary for developers and can be found here. All other utilities can be obtained from the GNU FTP site.

If you're experiencing problems, see also the section on buildconf failures.

Steps for using PHP from CVS

  1. It is recommended that you configure CVS by putting this in your ~/.cvsrc file: 
    cvs -z3
update -d -P
checkout -P
diff -u
  2. Log in to the PHP CVS server. We'll use the anonymous user cvsread as the username, and use phpfi as the password:
    cvs -d :pserver:cvsread@cvs.php.net:/repository login
  3. Obtain the latest PHP source from CVS. There is a single php-src directory that contains all PHP branches. To get PHP from CVS, use the "cvs checkout -r BRANCH" notation. To checkout the latest, consider the following CVS commands:

    PHP 4.4: cvs -d :pserver:cvsread@cvs.php.net:/repository checkout -r PHP_4_4 php-src
    PHP 5.2: cvs -d :pserver:cvsread@cvs.php.net:/repository checkout -r PHP_5_2 php5
    PHP 5.3: cvs -d :pserver:cvsread@cvs.php.net:/repository checkout -r PHP_5_3 php5
    PHP 6: cvs -d :pserver:cvsread@cvs.php.net:/repository checkout php6

    Some tips and notes:

    You may retrieve a specific release of PHP from CVS by using the -r flag in your cvs command. Some examples:
    cvs -d :pserver:cvsread@cvs.php.net:/repository checkout -r php_4_2_1 php-src
    cvs -d :pserver:cvsread@cvs.php.net:/repository checkout -r php_4_3_2 php-src

  4. Make sure you have autoconf 2.13 or newer, automake 1.4 or newer and libtool 1.4.

    Note that certain combinations of autoconf, automake and libtool may not work when used together. See below for details.
    Also, certain versions of autoconf may generate warnings of AC_PROG_CPP called before AC_PROG_CC. These messages can usually be ignored.

  5. Run ./buildconf. After a while, the configure script should be generated.
  6. From this point onwards, installation is similar to the installation of one of the official packages with one main difference – you must have bison 1.28 or later and flex 2.5.4 to compile, because the pre-generated scanner and parser files are not included in CVS.

There are also other things, like the XML source code for the documentation, available via anonymous CVS. See the web-based view of the CVS server to see what is available. For example, to checkout the latest english version of the PHP manual:
cvs -d :pserver:cvsread@cvs.php.net:/repository checkout phpdoc

autoconf, automake and libtool information

There seem to be problems with libtool 1.4.2. It is suggested that you use libtool 1.4, along with autoconf 2.13 and automake 1.4. You should also ensure that autoconf, automake and libtool are installed in the same directory. libtool 1.5 will not work.

The following combinations are known to work:

Zend/zend_language_scanner.c: No such file or directory

PHP only supports flex 2.5.4, not later versions as they broke backwards compatibility