Laravel Echo Server

NodeJs server for Laravel Echo broadcasting with Socket.io.

System Requirements

The following are required to function properly.

• Laravel 5.3
• Node 6.0+
• Redis 3+

Additional information on broadcasting with Laravel can be found on the official docs: https://laravel.com/docs/master/broadcasting

Getting Started

Install npm package globally with the following command:

$   npm install -g laravel-echo-server

Initialize with CLI Tool

Run the init command in your project directory:

$   laravel-echo-server init

The cli tool will help you setup a laravel-echo-server.json file in the root directory of your project. This file will be loaded by the server during start up. You may edit this file later on to manage the configuration of your server.

API Clients

The Laravel Echo Server exposes a light http API to perform broadcasting functionality. For security purposes, access to these endpoints from http referrers must be authenticated with an API id and key. This can be generated using the cli command:

$ laravel-echo-server client:add APP_ID

If you run client:add without an app id argument, one will be generated for you. After running this command, the client id and key will be displayed and stored in the laravel-echo-server.json file.

In this example, requests will be allowed as long as the app id and key are both provided with http requests.

Request Headers

Authorization:  Bearer skti68i...

or

http://app.dev:6001/apps/APP_ID/channels?auth_key=skti68i...

You can remove clients with laravel-echo-server client:remove APP_ID

Run The Server

in your project root directory, run

$ laravel-echo-server start

Stop The Server

in your project root directory, run

$ laravel-echo-server stop

Configurable Options

Edit the default configuration of the server by adding options to your laravel-echo-server.json file.

Title	Default	Description
apiOriginAllow	{}	Configuration to allow API be accessed over CORS. Example
authEndpoint	/broadcasting/auth	The route that authenticates private channels
authHost	http://localhost	The host of the server that authenticates private and presence channels
database	redis	Database used to store data that should persist, like presence channel members. Options are currently redis and sqlite
databaseConfig	{}	Configurations for the different database drivers Example
devMode	false	Adds additional logging for development purposes
host	null	The host of the socket.io server ex.app.dev. null will accept connections on any IP-address
port	6001	The port that the socket.io server should run on
protocol	http	Must be either http or https
sslCertPath	''	The path to your server's ssl certificate
sslKeyPath	''	The path to your server's ssl key
sslCertChainPath	''	The path to your server's ssl certificate chain
sslPassphrase	''	The pass phrase to use for the certificate (if applicable)
socketio	{}	Options to pass to the socket.io instance (available options)
subscribers	{"http": true, "redis": true}	Allows to disable subscribers individually. Available subscribers: http and redis

DotEnv

If a .env file is found in the same directory as the laravel-echo-server.json file, the following options can be overridden:

• authHost: LARAVEL_ECHO_SERVER_AUTH_HOST Note: This option will fall back to the LARAVEL_ECHO_SERVER_HOST option as the default if that is set in the .env file.
• host: LARAVEL_ECHO_SERVER_HOST
• port: LARAVEL_ECHO_SERVER_PORT
• devMode: LARAVEL_ECHO_SERVER_DEBUG

Running with SSL

• Your client side implementation must access the socket.io client from https.
• The server configuration must set the server host to use https.
• The server configuration should include paths to both your ssl certificate and key located on your server.

Note: This library currently only supports serving from either http or https, not both.

Alternative SSL implementation

If you are struggling to get SSL implemented with this package, you could look at using a proxy module within Apache or NginX. Essentially, instead of connecting your websocket traffic to https://yourserver.dev:6001/socket.io?..... and trying to secure it, you can connect your websocket traffic to https://yourserver.dev/socket.io. Behind the scenes, the proxy module of Apache or NginX will be configured to intercept requests for /socket.io, and internally redirect those to your echo server over non-ssl on port 6001. This keeps all of the traffic encrypted between browser and web server, as your web server will still do the SSL encryption/decryption. The only thing that is left unsecured is the traffic between your webserver and your Echo server, which might be acceptable in many cases.

Sample NginX proxy config

#the following would go within the server{} block of your web server config
location /socket.io {
	    proxy_pass http://laravel-echo-server:6001; #could be localhost if Echo and NginX are on the same box
	    proxy_http_version 1.1;
	    proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
	    proxy_set_header Connection "Upgrade";
	}

Setting the working directory

The working directory in which laravel-echo-server will look for the configuration file laravel-echo-server.json can be passed to the start command through the --dir parameter like so: laravel-echo-server start --dir=/var/www/html/example.com/configuration

Subscribers

The Laravel Echo Server subscribes to incoming events with two methods: Redis & Http.

Redis

Your core application can use Redis to publish events to channels. The Laravel Echo Server will subscribe to those channels and broadcast those messages via socket.io.

Http

Using Http, you can also publish events to the Laravel Echo Server in the same fashion you would with Redis by submitting a channel and message to the broadcast endpoint. You need to generate an API key as described in the API Clients section and provide the correct API key.

Request Endpoint

POST http://app.dev:6001/apps/your-app-id/events?auth_key=skti68i...

Request Body

{
  "channel": "channel-name",
  "name": "event-name",
  "data": {
      "key": "value"
  },
  "socket_id": "h3nAdb134tbvqwrg"
}

channel - The name of the channel to broadcast an event to. For private or presence channels prepend private- or presence-. channels - Instead of a single channel, you can broadcast to an array of channels with 1 request. name - A string that represents the event key within your app. data - Data you would like to broadcast to channel. socket_id (optional) - The socket id of the user that initiated the event. When present, the server will only "broadcast to others".

Pusher

The HTTP subscriber is compatible with the Laravel Pusher subscriber. Just configure the host and port for your Socket.IO server and set the app id and key in config/broadcasting.php. Secret is not required.

 'pusher' => [
    'driver' => 'pusher',
    'key' => env('PUSHER_KEY'),
    'secret' => null,
    'app_id' => env('PUSHER_APP_ID'),
    'options' => [
        'host' => 'localhost',
        'port' => 6001,
        'scheme' => 'http'
    ],
],

You can now send events using HTTP, without using Redis. This also allows you to use the Pusher API to list channels/users as described in the Pusher PHP library

HTTP API

The HTTP API exposes endpoints that allow you to gather information about your running server and channels.

Status Get total number of clients, uptime of the server, and memory usage.

GET /apps/:APP_ID/status

Channels List of all channels.

GET /apps/:APP_ID/channels

Channel Get information about a particular channel.

GET /apps/:APP_ID/channels/:CHANNEL_NAME

Channel Users List of users on a channel.

GET /apps/:APP_ID/channels/:CHANNEL_NAME/users

Cross Domain Access To API

Cross domain access can be specified in the laravel-echo-server.json file by changing allowCors in apiOriginAllow to true. You can then set the CORS Access-Control-Allow-Origin, Access-Control-Allow-Methods as a comma separated string (GET and POST are enabled by default) and the Access-Control-Allow-Headers that the API can receive.

Example below:

{
  "apiOriginAllow":{
    "allowCors" : true,
    "allowOrigin" : "http://127.0.0.1",
    "allowMethods" : "GET, POST",
    "allowHeaders" : "Origin, Content-Type, X-Auth-Token, X-Requested-With, Accept, Authorization, X-CSRF-TOKEN, X-Socket-Id"
  }
}

This allows you to send requests to the API via AJAX from an app that may be running on the same domain but a different port or an entirely different domain.

Database

To persist presence channel data, there is support for use of Redis or SQLite as a key/value store. The key being the channel name, and the value being the list of presence channel members.

Each database driver may be configured in the laravel-echo-server.json file under the databaseConfig property. The options get passed through to the database provider, so developers are free to set these up as they wish.

Redis

For example, if you wanted to pass a custom configuration to Redis:

{
  "databaseConfig" : {
    "redis" : {
      "port": "3001",
      "host": "redis.app.dev"
    }
  }
}

Note: No scheme (http/https etc) should be used for the host address

A full list of Redis options can be found here.

SQLite

With SQLite you may be interested in changing the path where the database is stored:

{
  "databaseConfig" : {
    "sqlite" : {
      "databasePath": "/path/to/laravel-echo-server.sqlite"
    }
  }
}

Note: node-sqlite3 is required for this database. Please install before using.

npm install sqlite3 -g

Presence Channels

When users join a presence channel, their presence channel authentication data is stored using Redis.

While presence channels contain a list of users, there will be instances where a user joins a presence channel multiple times. For example, this would occur when opening multiple browser tabs. In this situation "joining" and "leaving" events are only emitted to the first and last instance of the user.

Optionally, you can configure laravel-echo-server to publish an event on each update to a presence channel, by setting databaseConfig.publishPresence to true:

{
  "database": "redis",
  "databaseConfig": {
    "redis" : {
      "port": "6379",
      "host": "localhost"
    },
    "publishPresence": true
  }
}

You can use Laravel's Redis integration, to trigger Application code from there:

Redis::subscribe(['PresenceChannelUpdated'], function ($message) {
    var_dump($message);
});

Client Side Configuration

See the official Laravel documentation for more information. https://laravel.com/docs/master/broadcasting#introduction

Tips

Socket.io client library

You can include the socket.io client library from your running server. For example, if your server is running at app.dev:6001 you should be able to add a script tag to your html like so:

<script src="//app.dev:6001/socket.io/socket.io.js"></script>

Note: When using the socket.io client library from your running server, remember to check that the io global variable is defined before subscribing to events.

Better performance with µWebSockets

For extra performance, you can use the faster uws engine instead of ws, by setting the wsEngine option for Socket.IO in laravel-echo-server.json:

"socketio": {
    "wsEngine": "uws"
}

See https://github.com/uWebSockets/uWebSockets for more information.