PHP Runtime Environment

info

This article serves as a thorough introduction to Cloud Engine’s PHP runtime environment. To quickly get started with Cloud Engine, see Getting Started With Cloud Engine.

A PHP project has to have a composer.json and public/index.php under its root directory for Cloud Engine to correctly identify it as a PHP project.

If you are looking to start a new project, we recommend that you use our PHP sample project as a boilerplate.

How It Works

Cloud Engine runs your application with Nginx and PHP-FPM. The public directory will be mapped as the document root of your website. The .php files in this directory will be handled by PHP-FPM while other static files will be handled by Nginx. If a user requests a path that does not exist, the request will be handled by public/index.php, which can serve as the entry point for most frameworks.

Cloud Engine assigns a PHP-FPM worker for every 64 MB of memory. To customize the number of workers, you can add a custom environment variable on Cloud Engine’s Settings page with PHP_WORKERS as its name and the number of workers you want as its value. Keep in mind that if you set the number too low, there might not be enough workers for handling new requests; if you set the number too high, there might not be enough memory for handling requests.

Configure PHP Version

You can specify the PHP version you want to use in composer.json:

"require": {
  "php": "8.0"
}

At this time, Cloud Engine supports PHP 5.6, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, and 8.0.

note

If you don’t specify a PHP version, the latest stable version will be used.

Install Dependencies (composer.json)

Cloud Engine will automatically install the dependencies listed in composer.json. At this time, the version of Composer used by Cloud Engine is 1.x.

PHP Extensions

Regardless of what PHP version you are using, the following extensions will be enabled by default: fpm, curl, mysql, zip, xml, mbstring, gd, soap, and sqlite3.

For PHP 7.0 and above, mongodb will be enabled by default.

Starting from PHP 7.2, the mcrypt extension is not provided by default anymore. To use this extension in your project, you can add ext-mcrypt: * into require in composer.json. Adding mcrypt will increase the time needed for deployment. If your project doesn’t need this extension, you don’t have to add it.

Customize Build Process

You can override the default behavior by specifying startup commands (run), dependency installation commands (install), and build commands (build) in leanengine.yaml:

leanengine.yaml

run: echo 'run another command'
install:
  - {use: 'default'}
  - echo 'install additional dependencies here'
build:
  - echo 'overwrite default build command here'

See Reference: leanengine.yaml for more information.

System Dependencies

You can specify the system dependencies provided by the server-side environment using leanengine.yaml:

leanengine.yaml

systemDependencies:
  - imagemagick

See Reference: leanengine.yaml for a complete list of supported system dependencies.

Build Logs

By default, the logs generated during the build process won’t be printed to the console. If the build process fails, the logs from the last completed step will be printed to the console.

To print the complete build log for debugging, check Print build logs if you are deploying from the dashboard or add --options 'printBuildLogs=true' if you are deploying with the CLI.

Health Check

Cloud Engine is primarily optimized for web applications. Your app is expected to provide HTTP services through the port specified by the environment variable named LEANCLOUD_APP_PORT. Keep in mind that the app should listen on 0.0.0.0 (all interfaces) instead of 127.0.0.1 which is the default host of many frameworks.

While your app is being deployed, Cloud Engine will check your app every second to see if it has been successfully started. If your app has not been started within the time limit (30 seconds by default), the deployment will be canceled. After your app has been deployed, Cloud Engine will run health checks for your app regularly and automatically restart it if the check fails.

The way the health check works is that Cloud Engine will send an HTTP request to the homepage (/) of your app. If it gets an HTTP 2xx response, your app will pass the health check.

Health check and the Cloud Engine SDK

Cloud Engine will also check /__engine/1/ping which is handled by the SDK. If the SDK is integrated correctly, Cloud Engine will not check the homepage (/) anymore.

If Developer Center > Your game > Game Services > Cloud Services > Cloud Engine > Manage deployment > Your group > Settings > Cloud functions mode is set to Enable, or if functionsMode in leanengine.yaml is set to strict, Cloud Engine will check if the SDK is integrated correctly. If not, it will consider your app to have failed to start.

Customizing startup timeout (startupTimeout)

The default timeout for your app to start is 30 seconds. You can change it to any value between 15 and 120 seconds with leanengine.yaml:

leanengine.yaml

startupTimeout: 60

Cloud Environment

Custom Domains

Projects deployed to Cloud Engine can only be accessed with domains configured. You can bind domains by going to Developer Center > Your game > Game Services > Cloud Services > Cloud Engine > Manage deployment > Your group > Settings > Domains.

If you bind a domain that starts with stg- (e.g., stg-api.example.com), it will be assigned to the staging environment automatically.

We provide shared domains for apps that are still under testing. You can assign your app a shared domain with a prefix of your choice.

Load Balancer and CDN

All HTTP and HTTPS requests sent to Cloud Engine will go through a load balancer that deals with chores including HTTPS encryption, HTTPS redirection, and response compression. You won’t have to implement features for handling these tasks yourself for the programs hosted on Cloud Engine. Meanwhile, the load balancer brings the following restrictions that your program cannot bypass:

• Paths starting with /.well-known/acme-challenge/ are used by Cloud Engine to automatically renew certificates. Requests sent to these paths won’t be forwarded to your program.
• The size of a request header (URL and headers) should be within 64K and each line of the request header should be within 8K.
• The size of a request (for uploading files) should be within 100M.
• The timeout for connecting or waiting for a response is 60 seconds.

Getting the Client IP Address

Cloud Engine’s load balancer includes the following information depicting the original request in the HTTP header:

• X-Real-IP: The original IP address.
• X-Forwarded-Proto: The original protocol (http or https).
• Forwarded: Information about the proxy, defined by RFC 7239. It contains the IP address and the protocol.

$app->get('/', function($req, $res) {
  error_log($_SERVER['HTTP_X_REAL_IP']);
  return $res;
});

HTTPS Redirect

When you bind a custom Cloud Engine domain, you can enable Force HTTPS to have the load balancer redirect HTTP requests to HTTPS while keeping the paths.

Environment Variables

The following environment variables are available for your application to use:

Variable name	Description
LEANCLOUD_APP_ID	The App ID of the current application.
LEANCLOUD_APP_KEY	The App Key of the current application.
LEANCLOUD_APP_MASTER_KEY	The Master Key of the current application.
LEANCLOUD_APP_ENV	The environment your application is running in. If you are running your application on your local computer, the value will be non-existent or development (if you are starting your application with the CLI). It will be stage for the staging environment and production for the production environment.
LEANCLOUD_APP_PORT	The port opened up for your application. Your application has to listen on this port in order for users to access your service.
LEANCLOUD_API_SERVER	The address used to access the Data Storage service. Please use this value if your application needs to access the Data Storage service or other cloud services with the REST API.
LEANCLOUD_APP_GROUP	The group the instance is located at.
LEANCLOUD_REGION	The region the application is running in. It will be CN for Mainland China and US for the United States.
LEANCLOUD_VERSION_TAG	The version number of the deployment.

You can also set up custom environment variables on the dashboard to store configurations.

Logs

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See Cloud Engine Platform Features § Viewing Logs for more information on how to view logs and access logs on the dashboard.

Cloud Engine will collect the logs your application has printed to standard output (stdout) and standard error (stderr):

error_log("some error");

note

Each line of the logs can contain a maximum of 4096 characters. A maximum of 600 lines of logs can be collected every minute. The logs generated by your application that exceed these limits will be discarded.

Timezone

The timezone used on the server side is UTC+0.

File System

Your application can create temporary files under /home/leanengine and /tmp. The size limit for all the files created by your application is 1 GB.

caution

Each time you trigger a new deployment for your application, Cloud Engine will create a new container for it. Even though you don’t trigger deployments, Cloud Engine will still perform occasional maintenance operations. This means that your application should not treat the file system provided by Cloud Engine as permanent storage.

If the files created by your application bear relatively larger sizes, we recommend that your application always cleans them up once it finishes using them. Creating more files when there are already more than 1 GB files existing might lead to the Disk quota exceeded error. You can trigger a deployment to quickly clean up all the temporary files.

IP Addresses

Some third-party platforms (like Weixin Open Platform) may require that you provide an IP address whitelist. You can obtain the inbound and outbound IP addresses used by Cloud Engine on Developer Center > Your game > Game Services > Cloud Services > Cloud Engine > Manage deployment > Your group > Settings > Inbound IP and outbound IP.

We will do our best to minimize the frequency of changing the inbound and outbound IP addresses, but there remains the possibility for them to get changed. If you encounter any problems with IP addresses, the first thing you can do is look at the IP addresses displayed on the dashboard and see if they have been changed.

To get a fixed inbound IP address for your application, consider enabling dedicated IP.

Troubleshooting

Can I specify local Composer repositories with the path type?

Because Cloud Engine will copy composer.json and composer.lock to dedicated directories for installing dependencies, local Composer repositories with the path type are not supported. If your project uses local Composer repositories with the path type, we recommend that you change them to the vcs type.

When I deploy my project, it fails to fetch files from files.phpcomposer.com.

phpcomposer.com has already stopped its service, so if the composer.lock in your PHP project contains URLs under this domain, you won’t be able to install dependencies for your project. There are two solutions:

1. Remove composer.lock before you deploy your project so that Cloud Engine will install dependencies according to composer.json.
2. After you have correctly configured the repository address on your local computer, run composer update --lock to update the download links in composer.lock. This won’t affect the versions specified for the dependencies.