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

PHP.net CVS access

If you would like to grab PHP sources or other PHP.net hosted project data from PHP.net, read our anonymous CVS instructions. 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.

Using CVSup To Maintain A Local CVS Repository

In addition to anonymous CVS, we also provide read-only access to our CVS repository by using CVSup. While CVSup is faster at updating large trees, it is not as widely available as the standard CVS client. We will describe now how you can use CVSup.

1. Download the appropriate binary distribution from the CVSup homepage.
2. Follow the instructions in the Install file of the binary distribution
3. Create a php.cvsup file containing the following content:

   *default host=CVSup.php.net
   *default base=/usr/src/php
   *default release=cvs
   *default compress
   *default tag=.
   *default delete use-rel-suffix
   php-src

   This will cause the php-src tree to be stored in /usr/src/php (you need to create that directory manually).
4. At a command prompt, simply type: cvsup php.cvsup
5. If you are behind a firewall, you might need to use: cvsup -P - php.cvsup
6. To build PHP, you need to install a few utilities (GNU autoconf, libtool, bison). Cd into php-src and run ./buildconf.