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 5.0+
• 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-sever.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.

App Key

After initial configuration, an app key will be stored in the laravel-echo-server.json file, app key is required to perform certain actions on the server.

To generate a new app key, use the cli command:

$ laravel-echo-server key:generate

Referrers

The Laravel Echo Server exposes a light http Api to perform broadcasting functionality. For security purposes, access to these endpoints from http referrers other than the server's host must be registered. This can be done using the cli command:

$ laravel-echo-server referrer:add example.com

After running this command, an Api key for the referrer will be displayed and stored in the laravel-echo-server.json file.

In this example, requests from example.com will be allowed as long as the referrer's api_key is provided with http requests.

Request Headers

Auhtorization:  Bearer skti68i...

or

http://app.dev:6001/broadcast?api_key=skti68i...

Run The Server

in your project root directory, run

$ laravel-echo-server start

Configurable Options

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

Title	Default	Description
appKey	''	Unique app key used in security implementations
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
host	http://localhost	The host of the socket.io server ex.app.dev
port	6001	The port that the socket.io server should run on
protocol	http	either http or https
referrers	{}	Please see Referrers
sslCertPath	''	The path to your server's ssl certificate
sslKeyPath	''	The path to your server's ssl key
socketio	{}	Options to pass to the socket.io instance (available options)

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.

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.

Request Endpoint

POST http://app.dev:6001/broadcast

Request Body

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

Channel Name - The name of the channel to broadcast an event to. For private or presence channels prepend private- or presence-.

Message - Object containing information about the event.

• event - A string that represents the event key within your app.
• data - Data you would like to broadcast to channel.
• socket (optional) - The socket id of the user that initiated the event. When present, the server will only "broadcast to others".

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": "http://redis.app.dev"
    }
  }
}

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"
    }
  }
}

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.

Client Side Configuration

See the official Laravel documentation for more information. https://laravel.com/docs/5.3/broadcasting#introduction

Tips

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>