PHP WebSocket Server

Learn how to create WebSocket servers.

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AMPHP is a collection of event-driven libraries for PHP designed with fibers and concurrency in mind. This library provides a RequestHandler to easily handle WebSocket connections using amphp/http-server.

Requirements

  • PHP 8.1+

Installation

This package can be installed as a Composer dependency.

composer require amphp/websocket-server

Documentation

The primary component of this library is the Websocket class, an implementation of the RequestHandler interface from amphp/http-server. Endpoints using the Websocket request handler will upgrade incoming requests to a WebSocket connection.

Creating a Websocket endpoint requires the user to specify a number of parameters:

  • The Amp\Http\Server\HttpServer instance which will be used
  • A PSR-3 logger instance
  • A WebsocketAcceptor to accept client connections
  • A WebsocketClientHandler to handle client connections once accepted
  • An optional WebsocketCompressionContextFactory if compression should be enabled on the server
  • An optional WebsocketClientFactory if custom logic is needed when creating WebsocketClient instances

Accepting Client Connections

Accepting client connections is performed by an instance of WebsocketAcceptor. This library provides two implementations: and AllowOriginAcceptor

  • Rfc6455Acceptor: Accepts client connections based on RFC6455 with no further restrictions.
  • AllowOriginAcceptor: Requires the "Origin" header of the HTTP request to match one of the allowed origins provided to the constructor. Accepting the connection is then delegated to another WebsocketAcceptor implementation (Rfc6455Acceptor by default).

Handling Client Connections

Once established, a WebSocket connection is handled by an implementation of WebsocketClientHandler. This is where your WebSocket application logic will go.

WebsocketClientHanler has a single method which must be implemented, handleClient().

public function handleClient(
    WebsocketClient $client,
    Request $request,
    Response $response,
): void;

After accepting a client connection, WebsocketClientHandler::handleClient() is invoked with the WebsocketClient instance, as well as the Request and Response instances which were used to establish the connection.

This method should not return until the client connection should be closed. This method generally should not throw an exception. Any exception thrown will close the connection with an UNEXPECTED_SERVER_ERROR error code (1011) and forward the exception to the HTTP server logger. There is one exception to this: WebsocketClosedException, which is thrown when receiving or sending a message to a connection fails due to the connection being closed. If WebsocketClosedException is thrown from handleClient(), the exception is ignored.

Gateways

A WebsocketGateway provides a means of collecting WebSocket clients into related groups to allow broadcasting a single message efficiently (and asynchronously) to multiple clients. WebsocketClientGateway provided by this library may be used by one or more client handlers to group clients from one or more endpoints (or multiple may be used on a single endpoint if desired). See the example server below for basic usage of a gateway in a client handler. Clients added to the gateway are automatically removed when the client connection is closed.

Compression

Message compression may optionally be enabled on individual WebSocket endpoints by passing an instance of WebsocketCompressionContextFactory to the Websocket constructor. Currently, the only implementation available is Rfc7692CompressionFactory which implements compression based on RFC-7692.

Example Server

The server below creates a simple WebSocket endpoint which broadcasts all received messages to all other connected clients. amphp/http-server-router and amphp/http-server-static-content are used to attach the Websocket handler to a specific route and to serve static files from the /public directory if the route is not defined in the router.

<?php

// Note that this example requires amphp/http-server-router,
// amphp/http-server-static-content and amphp/log to be installed.

use Amp\Http\Server\DefaultErrorHandler;
use Amp\Http\Server\Request;
use Amp\Http\Server\Response;
use Amp\Http\Server\Router;
use Amp\Http\Server\SocketHttpServer;
use Amp\Http\Server\StaticContent\DocumentRoot;
use Amp\Log\ConsoleFormatter;
use Amp\Log\StreamHandler;
use Amp\Socket;
use Amp\Websocket\Server\AllowOriginAcceptor;
use Amp\Websocket\Server\Websocket;
use Amp\Websocket\Server\WebsocketClientGateway;
use Amp\Websocket\Server\WebsocketClientHandler;
use Amp\Websocket\Server\WebsocketGateway;
use Amp\Websocket\WebsocketClient;
use Monolog\Logger;
use function Amp\trapSignal;
use function Amp\ByteStream\getStdout;

require __DIR__ . '/../../vendor/autoload.php';

$logHandler = new StreamHandler(getStdout());
$logHandler->setFormatter(new ConsoleFormatter());
$logger = new Logger('server');
$logger->pushHandler($logHandler);

$server = SocketHttpServer::createForDirectAccess($logger);

$server->expose(new Socket\InternetAddress('127.0.0.1', 1337));
$server->expose(new Socket\InternetAddress('[::1]', 1337));

$errorHandler = new DefaultErrorHandler();

$acceptor = new AllowOriginAcceptor(
    ['http://localhost:1337', 'http://127.0.0.1:1337', 'http://[::1]:1337'],
);

$clientHandler = new class implements WebsocketClientHandler {
    public function __construct(
        private readonly WebsocketGateway $gateway = new WebsocketClientGateway(),
    ) {
    }

    public function handleClient(
        WebsocketClient $client,
        Request $request,
        Response $response,
    ): void {
        $this->gateway->addClient($client);

        foreach ($client as $message) {
            $this->gateway->broadcastText(sprintf(
                '%d: %s',
                $client->getId(),
                (string) $message,
            ));
        }
    }
};

$websocket = new Websocket($server, $logger, $acceptor, $clientHandler);

$router = new Router($server, $logger, $errorHandler);
$router->addRoute('GET', '/broadcast', $websocket);
$router->setFallback(new DocumentRoot($server, $errorHandler, __DIR__ . '/public'));

$server->start($router, $errorHandler);

// Await SIGINT or SIGTERM to be received.
$signal = trapSignal([SIGINT, SIGTERM]);

$logger->info(sprintf("Received signal %d, stopping HTTP server", $signal));

$server->stop();

Versioning

amphp/websocket-server follows the semver semantic versioning specification like all other amphp packages.

Security

If you discover any security related issues, please use the private security issue reporter instead of using the public issue tracker.

License

The MIT License (MIT). Please see LICENSE for more information.