Neither PHP nor MySQL are available for projects' web pages on Savannah. We could offer this facility if anyone is ready to volunteer to maintain this for Savannah and gnu.org in the long run. Installing it is not a big deal; however, making sure it actually works as expected day after day requires lot of attention (and perpetual worry).

The same goes for Perl, Python, or any other CGI. Apache SSI is available.

An excerpt from a mail exchange with (past FSF sysadmin) James Blair:

    I don't think we should support dynamic content right now.

    There is of course the security issue. Savannah and
    http://www.gnu.org are both very important servers and I'm not
    sure it's worth the risk.

    Probably more importantly, they are both pretty heavily loaded
    at the moment, and I'm not sure we should be adding any more
    work for them.

Comments

sandboxing and virtualization --foo, Thu, 23 Sep 2010 23:38:19 +0000

Seeing that it is 2010... shouldn't it be possible to set up the savannah web server as a reverse proxy and have it get its content from virtualized/sandboxed instances? That should ease some of the pains in regard to security AND performance...

Re: sandboxing and virtualization --Beuc, Fri, 24 Sep 2010 06:14:42

If you provide a solution that manages 3000 instances (one per project) without taking up all the RAM, with good performance balance so that 1 resource-intensive instance won't affect other instances (and so that all instances still have decent performances each), with a network setup that prevent abuses (spam, etc.), then we could install it. Oh wait, we have the same kind of issues with a basic, Apache-based shared hosting already :/ So what good would virtualization provide here, beside more complexity?