Installing Blackfire

Installing and updating Blackfire should be a quick process. This document will guide you through the steps.

Tell us what you want to do:

To start using Blackfire, we are going to install the following:

A language extension;
An agent to communicate with Blackfire's servers (as you chose a quick install, you will use a shared agent instead of installing one on your machine);
A profiling client (a browser extension or a CLI tool).

Install the Agent ¶

BLACKFIRE_CLIENT_ID="CLIENT_ID" \ 
BLACKFIRE_CLIENT_TOKEN="CLIENT_TOKEN" \ 
BLACKFIRE_SERVER_ID="SERVER_ID" \
BLACKFIRE_SERVER_TOKEN="SERVER_TOKEN" \
bash -c "$(curl -L https://installer.blackfire.io/installer.sh)"

This installs the APT package for the Blackfire Agent. It might prompt for your password to grant root privileges.

Install the PHP Probe ¶

Install the Probe by running:
```
sudo blackfire php:install
```
It is also possible to install the PHP Probe via the package manager. The step-by-step installation guide covers this way of installing Blackfire.
Restart your web server or PHP-FPM and check that there are no errors in the logs. To debug problems, you can change the log level and the log file in the Probe configuration.

Known incompatibilities

PHP will likely crash when Blackfire is used when one of the following extensions is also enabled: XHProf, Pinba, Suhosin, and Uopz.

If XDebug is installed, the PHP engine may not behave as expected; consider disabling it when profiling.

If pcov extension is installed, Blackfire will not behave as expected; consider disabling it when profiling.

Enable Monitoring ¶

You can now enable monitoring for your environments.

Install the Continuous Profiling PHP Probe

Please refer to the Continuous Profiling PHP configuration page for the installation and configuration procedures.

Install a Profiling Client ¶

To profile applications, you need to use a profiling client:

Profile from a browser via our browser extensions (Web applications only).

Your browser is not supported. Please switch to Firefox or Google Chrome to be able to profile from a browser.
Profile from the command line via the blackfire tool (Web applications, APIs, command line tools, daemons, and more).

Start Profiling ¶

Start profiling via: