Understand the flow.
Take control.

The PHPRay plugin for DirectAdmin gives every account on the server its own performance view inside the panel, and the administrator a server-wide overview. It is the panel half of Host Edition; the tracing itself comes from the extension and the collector, which you install first (shared hosting).

Status: 0.1.6, early. It has been run on a production CloudLinux server with DirectAdmin and PHP 7.4 in the panel, against collector 0.15.2, and both views render real data. The per-account switch was exercised on that server: off removes the extension from php -m, on puts it back, and the script refuses any account DirectAdmin does not own. It has not yet been through a full customer rollout, so treat it as a pilot: enable it for your own account first.

What the customer sees

Site performance for each of their domains:

• requests, errors, p95 latency and N+1 requests for the last 24 hours and 7 days,
• the slowest pages with request counts and p95,
• slow SQL fingerprints, plugin and theme breakdown, recent errors,
• a plain-language diagnosis with a health score,
• a switch to turn tracing off for that site, and "profile this URL prefix for N minutes" — both written to the account's .user.ini, nothing else,
• on CloudLinux with CageFS, a switch that turns PHPRay itself on or off for the whole account: it writes the extension's ini into the account's own PHP scan directory inside its cage and recycles that account's PHP workers. An account where the extension is not loaded sees a card saying so with a button, instead of pages of zeros.

What the administrator sees

Collector health and version, a 24-hour overview of the whole server, top domains by p95 and by request count, top users, active alerts, server-wide slow queries and the PHP versions in use. The admin view is read-only.

Requirements

• DirectAdmin with the plugin manager (the panel runs the pages under its own /usr/local/bin/php, currently PHP 7.4 — the plugin targets that),
• phpray-collector 0.15 or newer running on the same server, with a non-empty [auth] secret in /etc/phpray/collector.toml (the plugin signs short-lived JWTs with it and scopes each customer to their own domains),
• the extension installed for the PHP versions your accounts use, with tracing off by default and opt-in per account (install.sh does this on CloudLinux: see shared hosting).

Install

Download the plugin archive — it is Apache-2.0, like the rest of the core:

cd /usr/local/directadmin/plugins
curl -fsSLO https://phpray.dev/dl/phpray-directadmin.tar.gz
tar xzf phpray-directadmin.tar.gz          # unpacks into ./phpray/
/usr/local/directadmin/plugins/phpray/scripts/install.sh

The same archive can be uploaded in DirectAdmin's plugin manager instead; it has phpray/ at the top level, which is the shape the manager expects. Every release also keeps a versioned copy under phpray.dev/dl/.

The script sets the file modes and owners, creates conf/phpray.conf from the example, copies the collector's [auth] secret into it, and installs a /etc/sudoers.d/phpray rule that lets only diradmin run the one script that edits a customer's .user.ini (validated with visudo before it is installed). scripts/uninstall.sh reverses all of it.

Check conf/phpray.conf afterwards:

collector_url=http://127.0.0.1:9191
jwt_secret=<the collector's [auth] secret>
profile_minutes=10

Without jwt_secret the customer view says so instead of showing empty cards.

Notes from the first production run

• The panel executes the pages with DirectAdmin's own PHP (7.4 today), not with the account's PHP version. Keep that in mind when changing the plugin code.
• The collector API takes its time window in minutes (window=1440), not hours.
• Long-lived PHP workers keep the extension they loaded at start: after installing or upgrading the extension, recycle that account's workers instead of restarting the whole web server.
• Enable the extension per account, never for a whole PHP version. A worker that loads phpray.so installs its hooks at module startup regardless of phpray.enabled; use phpray.master_switch=0 for anything server-wide. See shared hosting.
• phpray.enabled in .user.ini is not a way to install or remove the extension: PHP reads per-directory values long after module startup. The per-account switch writes the ini into /var/cagefs/<n>/<account>/etc/cl.php.d/alt-php<NN>/phpray.ini, which the cage mounts at /opt/alt/php<NN>/link/conf/, and then recycles that account's lsphp workers. PHP Selector does not manage it: the selector only knows CloudLinux's own packaged extensions.