Pure PHP WebSocket Server Example

This example show up how to setup a WebSocket with pure PHP, with minimal codes and dependencies, with:

• The example Nginx configuration.
• Setup wscat with NPM so you can learn how to detect service is on or off.

The components you needs:

• PHP 5.4 or above, with event extension.
• Redis 2.8 or above.
• Nginx if you need run the nginx example.
• NPM if you need wscat.

How to run

First of all, install dependencies by Composer:

composer install

Than install the NPM components:

npm install

Start the Redis server if needs:

redis-server &

Start the daemon:

php app.php

The daemon will listen for all TCP traffic from anywhere to port 8080.

Now we using wscat connect to the WebSocket server. Start another terminal session:

node_modules/wscat/bin/wscat ws://127.0.0.1:8080 -p 13

Now the wscat interactive shell has been start.

Start another terminal session again, start the redis-cli:

redis-cli

Enter follow line or copy follow line into redis-cli and press enter:

PUBLISH pubsub:example 'Hello World!'

Now you can see 'Hello world!' in terminal session which running wscat.

The Nginx Example

Start Nginx with example configration:

nginx -c $(pwd)/nginx/nginx.conf

In this example, only traffic send to /ws/ will pass through to the WebSocket server, and we using port 8000 for nginx:

node_modules/wscat/bin/wscat ws://127.0.0.1:8000/ws/ -p 13