This entire page is irrelevant! When creating the extension, I missed a line in the Google documentation allowing me to clean up unused code. This source clean up reduced the size of the install zip file from 30MB to less than 2MB. No PHP/HTTP server configuration changes are necessary for this extension post version 5.1.6
Carry on!
Installing the plugin is simple, and yet difficult. Because of the infrastructure required (PHP libraries), the size of the plugin is nearly 30MB. This requires special PHP and HTTP server configurations.
Why is it so big? Genetics - I mean dependencies. Interactions with IndexNow take only a few lines of code. It's super easy, barely an inconvenience. Google, however, requires a ton of code. 99.99997% of this plugin is dependencies to satisfy requirements of the connection to Google. Without these dependencies, this plugin would be less than 40KB uncompressed!
PHP Considerations
Upload Size
There are 2 settings within your php.ini file which affect the maximum size of your uploads. Both of these values need to be above the 30MB size of this plugin. A nice round number would be 32MB, and there isn't any reason to leave these settings in place once the installation is complete, although you may need to reinstate them to perform an update.
upload_max_filesize = 32Mpost_max_size = 32M
You could go bigger if you wanted, but 32 will get you by for this plugin. Joomla provides an easy way to find your current settings: Under the System menu in /administrator, open the System Information link and have a look at PHP Information. You'll find the current values for both of these settings there, which will tell you if you need to modify them.
Execution Time
Because of the size of the plugin, extraction takes some time. This will depend on many factors, but you may run into a situation where your server cannot extract the zip file fast enough - generating a strange blank error message. In these cases, try adjusting your max execution time in the same place you made the upload size changes.
max_execution_time = 60
How those modifications are made in your environment is beyond the scope of this document. Consult the maintainer of your server operating system for that information.
Apache2 Considerations
There are several ways to alter the maximum upload file size in Apache. One easy method is using .htaccess
Joomla provides an example .htaccess file, and if you're using that file then you only need to add a single line of code. The location where you insert this code is important. The example file provided by Joomla contains a lot of comments at the very beginning. There is a section titled "READ THIS COMPLETELY IF YOU CHOOSE TO USE THIS FILE"
I suggest inserting the following line immediately following that comment block (the block of lines beginning with #), there should be a blank line where you can safely insert this configuration option:
LimitRequestBody 33544432
Another option is to make this exact same configuration in your httpd.conf - but this is a more wide-reaching configuration change. If you don't know how to do this, definitely ask for help or you can take your server down.
nginx Considerations
Similar to Apache2, nginx requires a setting to increase maximum upload file sizes.
In my environment, this configuration is easily made by creating a single file at this location /etc/nginx/conf.d/upload.conf
The contents are as follows:
client_max_body_size 32M;
Restarting NGINX applies this change. Be certain that it isn't already present in other files by testing the configuration before restarting the service. As suggested with the Apache2 configuration, if you don't know how to do this - ask for help.
