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

To run Shariff PHP Backend on your server you need:

• PHP 5.4 or greater

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:

Cache settings:

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}

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"];