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 APP 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_HOSTNote: This option will fall back to the LARAVEL_ECHO_SERVER_HOST option as the default if that is set in the .env file.
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";
}
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...
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.
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.
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:
Note 1: The path is relative to the root of your application, not your system.
Note 2: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:
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:
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.
µWebSockets deprecation
µWebSockets has been officially deprecated. Currently there is no support for µWebSockets in Socket.IO, but it may have the new ClusterWS support incoming. Meanwhile Laravel Echo Server will use ws engine by default until there is another option.