Project Web Upgrade Notice

A notice for our project admins: our project web service is scheduled to be updated to use Apache 2.4 on Monday, July 23, at 17:00 GMT. This upgrade will allow us to take advantage of all the latest Apache features and to offer some other improvements, such as supporting multiple PHP versions, including PHP 7.x.

The upgrade should be mostly transparent to our hosted projects, but in a few cases there will be tweaks needed in some .htaccess files due to the changes in the config directives. We are avoiding most of the issues by using the mod_access_compat module to continue to support Apache 2.2 allow/deny directives, and we also have SSILegacyExprParser enabled to continue to allow older shtml variable expansions.  Some of the configuration-change issues that remain include:

• DefaultType is no longer supported, so it is ignored with a warning. The latest standard is to not provide a type on unknown files and let the browser determine the mime type.
• MaxRedirects has been removed in favor of LimitInternalRecursion.
• Apache ignores a 401 ErrorDocument that has a full URL specified (it must be a relative path on the local server).
• For more details, there is the official upgrade document, but projects aren’t affected by most of the changes highlighted there.

* If you use MultiViews in your .htaccess file, make sure that you define any language suffixes you need, such as “AddLanguage en .en”

We will be monitoring the error-log files to look for issues and may fix some of the more verbose offenders that we see. We suggest that project admins verify that their pages are working OK sometime after the upgrade time on Monday. You can download a copy of the error logs to check for any warnings that happened during your testing. If you see any issues that you are not able to fix, please let us know.