What are the system requirements for lil-terminal?
Current hosting requirements for the maintained PHP 8 line of lil-terminal.
What the core needs
PHP 8, a modern browser and write access to the installation directory during first-run extraction are enough for the core. lil-terminal does not require SSH, Composer, Node.js or a system shell.
Resource-heavy work
Large archives, images, uploads, hashes and structured data can need more memory, execution time and temporary disk space than the core itself. Individual modules also check the PHP extensions they require and report missing capabilities explicitly.
PHP
Available now
The PHP line is the current lil-terminal implementation. It is designed for ordinary shared hosting where PHP is available but SSH, a system shell, Composer or Node.js may not be.
Minimum requirements
- Runtime
- PHP 7.4 with the frozen compatibility build, or PHP 8.0+ with the maintained line. PHP 7.4 is upstream end-of-life and is retained only for legacy hosting.
- Web server
- Any web server that can execute PHP: Apache, Nginx with PHP-FPM, LiteSpeed, IIS with PHP or an equivalent hosting stack.
- PHP memory_limit
- 32 MiB for the core and small operations.
- Execution time
- 30 seconds per request.
- Free disk space
- 16 MiB for lil-terminal itself and small temporary files, plus enough space for the files you actually process.
- Sessions and filesystem
- PHP sessions enabled;
lil.phpand its working directory must be readable, and the paths you modify must be writable by the PHP process. - Repository access
- Outbound HTTPS access to repo.lil.dog through PHP URL streams or cURL. SSH is not required.
- Browser
- A current Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari with JavaScript and cookies enabled.
Recommended requirements
- Runtime
- PHP 8.4 or 8.5 on a branch still receiving upstream security fixes.
- PHP memory_limit
- 128 MiB or more; increase it for large JSON/XML documents, image work, archives and database result sets.
- Execution time
- 120 seconds or more for long archive, network and maintenance operations.
- Free disk space
- At least 256 MiB of reserve space, plus workspace proportional to the largest file or archive you expect to process.
- Transport security
- HTTPS for the terminal page and valid CA trust for outbound TLS.
- Useful PHP extensions
- As needed by modules: cURL, OpenSSL, ZipArchive/Phar, mbstring or iconv, DOM, EXIF/GD or Imagick, PDO/database drivers, Redis or MongoDB. Bare core does not require exec() or shell_exec().
- Uploads
- Set upload_max_filesize and post_max_size above the largest file you expect to upload through the browser.
These limits describe the terminal itself. Commands that read, unpack, hash, transform or upload large data need memory, time and disk proportional to that data.