Putty Mirrors

PuTTY Web Site Mirrors

This is a mirror. The primary PuTTY web site can be found here.

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Here is a list of PuTTY web site mirrors. I add to this list when people tell me mirrors exist: I don't go out looking for them. If you want to mirror the PuTTY site, you're welcome to - tell me about it and I'll put it on the list. Be sure to read the mirroring guidelines below.

The official PuTTY home site, in case that isn't where you're reading this, is

HTTP mirrors of the whole site:

Be aware that the mirrors are not updated instantly. Also, in many cases, none of the FTP links on the Download page have been mirrored - they still point to the same places as on the original web site. (The HTTP links on the Download page have been mirrored.)

FTP mirrors of the PuTTY releases:

HTTP mirrors of the PuTTY development snapshots:

FTP mirrors of the PuTTY development snapshots:

Mirroring guidelines

Mirrors of the PuTTY web site are welcome, especially in regions not well covered by existing mirrors. (However, if you're in a region that is already well served by mirrors, you should consider whether yet another one will be worth the effort.) Please don't bother asking us for permission before setting up a mirror. You already have permission.

The preferred (and simplest) way to mirror the PuTTY website is to use rsync. We provide a version of the website content intended for use as a standalone mirror, at rsync://rsync.chiark.greenend.org.uk/ftp/users/sgtatham/putty-website-mirror. So you could set up a mirror by running a cron job which issued a command something like this every day:

rsync -auH rsync://rsync.chiark.greenend.org.uk/ftp/users/sgtatham/putty-website-mirror/ .

You should run this command inside the directory where you plan to put the mirror; when that command is run, it will fill the current directory with HTML files and subdirectories. Alternatively, you can replace . with the name of the target directory.

If you use the above command to fetch our pre-packaged mirror site, it will only work as designed if your web server is Apache: the site contains a .htaccess file which handles a couple of non-obvious MIME types and deals with making the virtual subdirectory "latest" redirect to the current latest release. You may need to configure Apache to honour the .htaccess file with a directive such as AllowOverride. If you do not use Apache, you will have to reproduce this behaviour in some other way suitable for your own web server.

(We prefer that the "latest" redirect be handled as an HTTP-visible redirect, rather than a server-side filesystem tweak such as a symlink, for better behaviour in the face of web caches.)

Since rsync is incremental, there should be no reason not to update frequently, although currently there's no point in doing so more often than once a day. In any case, we would recommend updating no less often than once a week, in order to fetch any urgent updates such as security bugfixes. You can also subscribe to our mailing list to receive notification of new releases.

We used to support an alternative method of mirroring using GNU wget, and provided a sample shell script. This is now deprecated in favour of rsync, for the following reasons:

  • rsync uses less bandwidth;
  • the rsync method moves all the post-processing complexity to our end, so we can implement changes and deal with bugs much more easily - and in particular, it allows us to insert a note to the effect that the mirrored site is a mirror site to reduce general confusion;
  • we've had trouble in the past with mirroring wgets going mad and eating all our host's bandwidth/CPU, which rsync hasn't yet done, to our knowledge.

Once you've set up your mirror, mail us with its address and the country it's in. However, before notifying us, please do test that it works:

  • Check that the binary download links work.
  • Check that the binary download links point at your site, not ours. If they point straight back to our own binary downloads, there is not much point in having the mirror site in the first place!
  • Check that the on-line documentation for the latest release works, and points at your site not ours.

If you want to comment on this web site, see the Feedback page.
(last modified on Wed Jul 12 00:30:40 2006)