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Real-time community chat built with Marko.

Dogfooding the Marko PHP Framework for its own developer community, showcasing plugins, preferences, events, and modules in a real application.

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Features

• Spaces — Organized chat channels with membership and permissions
• Real-time messaging — Server-Sent Events powered by PostgreSQL LISTEN/NOTIFY
• Markdown — Bold, italic, code blocks, and links in messages
• Reactions — Emoji reactions on messages
• Pinning — Pin important messages to the top
• Rate limiting — Configurable per-user message throttling
• Admin panel — User and space management

Quick Start

Prerequisites

• PHP 8.5+
• Composer 2.x
• Node.js (for Tailwind CSS)
• Docker (for PostgreSQL)

Setup

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/marko-php/markotalk.git
cd markotalk

# Start PostgreSQL
docker compose up -d

# Install dependencies
composer install
npm install

# Configure environment
cp .env.example .env

Update .env with the database settings from compose.yaml:

APP_ENV=development
DB_HOST=127.0.0.1
DB_PORT=5432
DB_DATABASE=markotalk
DB_USERNAME=postgres
DB_PASSWORD=postgres

Run migrations and start the dev server:

# Run database migrations
php marko migrate

# Start the development server
marko up

Note: marko up starts PHP with PHP_CLI_SERVER_WORKERS=4 by default, which is required because MarkoTalk uses SSE for real-time messaging. Without multiple workers, the SSE connection blocks all other requests on the single-threaded PHP built-in server.

To promote a user to admin (for pinning messages, moderation, etc.):

docker compose exec db psql -U postgres markotalk -c \
  "UPDATE users SET role = 'admin' WHERE username = 'myusername';"

Visit http://localhost:8000 to get started.

Tech Stack

Layer	Technology
Framework	Marko PHP Framework
Database	PostgreSQL 17
Templates	Latte 3.0
Real-Time	SSE + PostgreSQL LISTEN/NOTIFY
Testing	Pest PHP
Styling	Tailwind CSS 4
Client-Side	Vanilla JavaScript

Project Structure

app/                  # Application modules
├── admin/            # Admin panel
├── message/          # Messaging (send, edit, delete, reactions, SSE)
├── notification/     # User notifications
├── space/            # Spaces (channels, memberships)
└── user/             # Authentication, profiles, presence
config/               # PHP configuration files
database/migrations/  # Sequential migration files
public/               # Entry point, CSS, JS, storage
resources/views/      # Latte templates

Commands

# Run tests (parallel)
./vendor/bin/pest --parallel

# Run tests (sequential)
./vendor/bin/pest

# Lint check
./vendor/bin/phpcs --standard=phpcs.xml

# Lint fix
./vendor/bin/php-cs-fixer fix && ./vendor/bin/phpcbf

# Static analysis
./vendor/bin/rector process

Status

MarkoTalk is in active development alongside the Marko framework. It serves as both a real application and a reference implementation for Marko's module system.

Learn More

• Marko Framework — Documentation and guides
• Build a Real-time Chat — Tutorial covering the architecture behind MarkoTalk
• marko-php/marko — Framework source code

Credits

Created by Mark Shust

License

MarkoTalk is open-source software licensed under the MIT License.