Shariff PHP Backend

Shariff is used to determine how often a page is shared in social media, but without generating requests from the displaying page to the social sites.

This document describes the PHP backend. The following backends are also available:

• shariff-backend-node
• shariff-backend-perl

Supported services

• Facebook
• Flattr
• GooglePlus
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest
• Reddit
• StumbleUpon
• Twitter
• Xing

Requirements

To run Shariff PHP Backend on your server you need:

• PHP 5.4 or greater

Installing the Shariff backend on you own server

To run Shariff under a certain URL, unzip the release zip file and put contents of build/ into a directory under the document root of your web server.

This zip file contains contains a configuration file shariff.json. The following configuration options are available:

Key	Type	Description
cache	object	File cache settings described below
domain	string	Domain for which share counts may be requested
services	array	List of services to be enabled. See Supported services.

Cache settings:

Key	Type	Description
ttl	integer	Time that the counts are cached (in seconds)
cacheDir	string	Directory used for the cache. Default: system temp directory

Testing your installation

If the backend runs under http://example.com/my-shariff-backend/, calling the URL http://example.com/my-shariff-backend/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com should return a JSON structure with numbers in it, e.g.:

{"facebook":1452,"twitter":404,"googleplus":23,"linkedin":118,"reddit":7,"stumbleupon":4325,"flattr":0,"pinterest":3}

Shariff OO interface

If you need more control, you can invoke Shariff in your own PHP code. The following snippet should get you started. $options are identical to those described above.

use Heise\Shariff\Backend;

$options = [
	"domain"   => 'www.heise.de',
	"cache"    => ["ttl" => 1],
	"services" => ["Facebook", "GooglePlus", "Twitter", "LinkedIn", "Reddit", "StumbleUpon", "Flattr", "Pinterest"]
]
$shariff = Backend->new($options);
$counts = $backend->get("http://www.heise.de/");
echo $counts["facebook"];