fog-version-check

The service behind https://fogproject.org/version/ — the thing every FOG install asks "am I running the latest version?".

packages/web/status/mainversion.php POSTs the server's own FOG_VERSION here and renders whatever comes back on the About page. That is the only caller in FOGProject/fogproject; the JSON parameters below are a public contract with anything else already pointed at this URL.

Endpoints

Request	Answer
POST version=<FOG_VERSION>	HTML: up to date, or the latest of all three branches
?stable ?dev ?alpha	JSON, any combination — e.g. {"stable":"1.5.10.2254","dev":"1.5.10.2439","alpha":"1.6.0-beta.4691"}
/version.php	The bare VERSION constant from config.php. Vestigial — see that file

alpha is the beta branch (working-1.6). The parameter predates the branch being called beta and is not renamed, because callers exist that we cannot see.

Where each version comes from

Branch	Source
stable	packages/web/lib/fog/system.class.php on raw.githubusercontent
dev-branch	same path, that branch
working-1.6	the release prefix from packages/web/src/Base/System.php, plus a commit count from the GitHub compare API

That third row is the whole reason this repo exists rather than a file edited in place on the host.

FOG_VERSION on working-1.6 is git rev-list master..HEAD --count. Since GH-1513 it is generated at commit, checkout and install time into the gitignored packages/web/commons/version.php, because holding a per-branch count in a tracked file made every branch open at once conflict on the same line. So System.php now carries only the bare release fallback, 1.6.0-beta, with no build number — and scraping it the way stable and dev-branch are scraped returns a string no running 1.6 server can ever equal. Every beta install gets told it is out of date, forever.

The count is recovered from GitHub's compare API, which reports exactly that number as ahead_by:

/repos/FOGProject/fogproject/compare/master...working-1.6?per_page=1&page=2

per_page=1&page=2 is load-bearing. The files[] diff of master...working-1.6 is attached to page 1 only, so asking for page 2 takes the response from ~2.5 MB to ~13 KB while ahead_by stays present on every page. Unauthenticated GitHub allows 60 requests an hour per IP; the 300-second cache makes this 12. The API also rejects any request that sends no User-Agent.

Deploy

The document root for fogproject.org is /var/www/html/website, so the served path is /var/www/html/website/version — a clone at /var/www/html/version is not reachable at fogproject.org/version/.

cd /var/www/html/website
mv version version.pre-repo                      # keep the old copy until this is proven
git clone https://github.com/FOGProject/fog-version-check.git version
chown -R nginx:nginx version/cache               # ONLY cache/ -- see below
php version/bin/diagnose.php

Only cache/ is writable by the web user. Nothing that serves a request can then rewrite index.php, which is the point of not making the checkout writable.

The three cache/*.txt files are runtime state and gitignored. Deleting them costs one GitHub fetch.

Updating

cd /var/www/html/website/version && git pull && systemctl reload php-fpm

The reload is not optional if opcache is set to skip timestamp checks — the classic symptom is replacing the file and seeing the old behavior unchanged. bin/diagnose.php reports the setting.

Diagnosing

sudo -u nginx php /var/www/html/website/version/bin/diagnose.php

Checks the deploy (right file on disk, opcache revalidation), GitHub (all three sources, the compare API, the rate limit) and the cache (writable, contents, age) — independently, sharing no code with index.php, so it can tell you the endpoint itself is broken. Exit status is non-zero if anything failed.