ReactPHP is a low-level library for event-driven programming in PHP. At its core is an event loop, on top of which it provides low-level utilities, such as: Streams abstraction, async DNS resolver, network client/server, HTTP client/server and interaction with processes. Third-party libraries can use these components to create async network clients/servers and more.

<?php

// $ composer require react/http react/socket # install example using Composer
// $ php example.php # run example on command line, requires no additional web server

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

$server = new React\Http\HttpServer(function (Psr\Http\Message\ServerRequestInterface $request) {
    return React\Http\Message\Response::plaintext(
        "Hello World!\n"
    );
});

$socket = new React\Socket\SocketServer('127.0.0.1:8080');
$server->listen($socket);

echo "Server running at http://127.0.0.1:8080" . PHP_EOL;

This simple web server written in ReactPHP responds with “Hello World!” for every request.

ReactPHP is production ready and battle-tested with millions of installations from all kinds of projects around the world. Its event-driven architecture makes it a perfect fit for efficient network servers and clients handling hundreds or thousands of concurrent connections, long-running applications and many other forms of cooperative multitasking with non-blocking I/O operations. What makes ReactPHP special is its vivid ecosystem with hundreds of third-party libraries allowing you to integrate with many existing systems, such as common network services, database systems and other third-party APIs.

• Production ready and battle-tested.
• Rock-solid with stable long-term support (LTS) releases.
• Requires no extensions and runs on any platform - no excuses!
• Takes advantage of optional extensions to get better performance when available.
• Highly recommends latest version of PHP 7+ for best performance and support.
• Supports legacy PHP 5.3+ and HHVM for maximum compatibility.
• Well designed and reusable components.
• Decoupled parts so they can be replaced by alternate implementations.
• Carefully tested (unit & functional).
• Promotes standard PSRs where possible for maximum interoperability.
• Aims to be technology neutral, so you can use your preferred application stack.
• Small core team of professionals supported by large network of outside contributors.

ReactPHP is non-blocking by default. Use workers for blocking I/O. The event loop is based on the reactor pattern (hence the name) and strongly inspired by libraries such as EventMachine (Ruby), Twisted (Python) and Node.js (V8).

This repository you’re currently looking at is mostly used as a meta repository to discuss and plan all things @ReactPHP. See the individual components linked below for more details about each component, its documentation and source code.

Core Components

• EventLoop ReactPHP’s core reactor event-loop. Read the documentation

• Stream Event-driven readable and writable streams for non-blocking I/O in ReactPHP. Read the documentation

• Promise Promises/A implementation for PHP. Read the documentation

• Async Async utilities and fibers for ReactPHP. Read the documentation

Network Components

• Socket Async, streaming plaintext TCP/IP and secure TLS socket server and client connections for ReactPHP. Read the documentation

• Datagram Event-driven UDP client and server sockets for ReactPHP. Read the documentation

• HTTP Event-driven, streaming HTTP client and server implementation for ReactPHP. Read the documentation

• DNS Async DNS resolver for ReactPHP. Read the documentation

Utility Components

• Cache Async caching for ReactPHP. Read the documentation

• ChildProcess Library for executing child processes. Read the documentation

• PromiseTimer Trivial timeout implementation for ReactPHP’s Promise lib. Read the documentation

• PromiseStream The missing link between Promise-land and Stream-land, built on top of ReactPHP. Read the documentation

Built with ReactPHP

• Thruway PHP Client and Router Library for Autobahn and WAMP (Web Application Messaging Protocol) for Real-Time Application Messaging voryx/Thruway

• PPM - PHP Process Manager PPM is a process manager, supercharger and load balancer for modern PHP applications. php-pm/php-pm

• php-ar-drone 🚁 Port of node-ar-drone which allows user to control a Parrot AR Drone over PHP jolicode/php-ar-drone

• Ratchet Asynchronous WebSocket server ratchetphp/Ratchet

• Predis\Async Asynchronous PHP client library for Redis built on top of ReactPHP nrk/predis-async

• clue/redis-server A Redis server implementation in pure PHP clue/redis-server

And many more on our wiki page »

Articles

• Sergey Zhuk A series of articles covering ReactPHP: from the basics to the real application examples. sergeyzhuk.me

• Cees-Jan Kiewiet Blog series about several ReactPHP components and how they work. blog.wyrihaximus.net

• Loïc Faugeron Super Speed Symfony - ReactPHP. gnugat.github.io

• Marc J. Schmidt Bring High Performance Into Your PHP App (with ReactPHP). marcjschmidt.de

• Marc Morera When ReactPHP meet Symfony medium.com/@apisearch

Talks

• Christian Lück Pushing the limits with ReactPHP

• Jeremy Mikola Async PHP With React

• Igor Wiedler Event-driven PHP

Getting started

ReactPHP consists of a set of individual components. This means that instead of installing something like a “ReactPHP framework”, you actually pick only the components that you need.

This project follows SemVer for all its stable components. The recommended way to install these components is through Composer. New to Composer?

For example, this may look something like this:

# recommended install: pick required components
composer require react/event-loop react/http

As an alternative, we also provide a meta package that will install all stable components at once. Installing this is only recommended for quick prototyping, as the list of stable components may change over time. This meta package can be installed like this:

# quick protoyping only: install all stable components
composer require react/react:^1.4

For more details, check out ReactPHP’s homepage for quickstart examples and usage details.

See also the combined changelog for all ReactPHP components for details about version upgrades.

Support

Do you have a question and need help with ReactPHP? Don’t worry, we’re here to help!

As a first step, check the elaborate documentation that comes with each component (see links to individual documentation for each component above). If you find your question is not answered within the documentation, there’s a fair chance that it may be relevant to more people. Please do not hesitate to file your question as an issue in the relevant component so others can also participate.

You can also check out our official Gitter chat room. Most of the people involved in this project are available in this chat room, so many questions get answered in a few minutes to some hours. We also use this chat room to announce all new releases and ongoing development efforts, so consider staying in this chat room for a little longer.

Also follow @reactphp on Twitter for updates. We use this mostly for noteworthy, bigger updates and to keep the community updated about ongoing development efforts. You can always use the #reactphp hashtag if you have anything to share!

We’re a very open project and we prefer public communication whenever possible, so that more people can participate and help getting the best solutions available. At the same time, we realize that some things are better addressed in private. Whether you just want to say thank you, want to report a security issue or want to help sponsor a certain feature development, you can reach out to the core team in private by sending an email to support@reactphp.org. Please keep in mind that we’re a small team of volunteers and do our best to support anybody reaching out.

Do you want to support ReactPHP? Awesome! Let’s start with letting the the world know why you think ReactPHP is awesome and try to help others getting on board! Send a tweet, write a blog post, give a talk at your local user group or conference or even write a book. There are many ways you can help. You can always reach out to us in private and help others in our support channels. Thank you!

Tests

To run the test suite, you first need to clone this repo and then install all dependencies through Composer:

composer install

To run the test suite, go to the project root and run:

vendor/bin/phpunit

The test suite also contains a number of functional integration tests that rely on a stable internet connection. Due to the vast number of integration tests, these are skipped by default during CI runs. If you also do not want to run these, they can simply be skipped like this:

vendor/bin/phpunit --exclude-group internet

License

MIT, see LICENSE.