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:
Supported services
- Flattr
- GooglePlus
- StumbleUpon
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"];