Websockets

Pusher Configuration ⛓

When broadcasting events from your Pixelfed server to your WebSocket server, the default behavior is to send the event information to the official Pusher server. But since the Pixelfed WebSockets package comes with its own Pusher API implementation, we need to tell Pixelfed to send the events to our own server.

To do this, you should add the host and port configuration key to your config/broadcasting.php and add it to the pusher section. The default port of the Pixelfed WebSocket server is 6001.

'pusher' => [
    'driver' => 'pusher',
    'key' => env('PUSHER_APP_KEY'),
    'secret' => env('PUSHER_APP_SECRET'),
    'app_id' => env('PUSHER_APP_ID'),
    'options' => [
        'cluster' => env('PUSHER_APP_CLUSTER'),
        'encrypted' => true,
        'host' => env('PUSHER_APP_HOST', '127.0.0.1'),
        'port' => env('PUSHER_APP_PORT', 6001),
        'scheme' => env('PUSHER_APP_SCHEME', 'http'),
        'curl_options' => [
            CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST => 0,
            CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER => 0,
        ],
    ],
],

Starting the WebSocket server ⛓

Once you have configured your WebSocket apps and Pusher settings, you can start the Pixelfed WebSocket server by issuing the artisan command:

php artisan websockets:serve

Using a different port ⛓

The default port of the Pixelfed WebSocket server is 6001. You may pass a different port to the command using the --port option.

php artisan websockets:serve --port=3030

This will start listening on port 3030.

Restricting the listening host ⛓

By default, the Pixelfed WebSocket server will listen on 0.0.0.0 and will allow incoming connections from all networks. If you want to restrict this, you can start the server with a --host option, followed by an IP.

For example, by using 127.0.0.1, you will only allow WebSocket connections from localhost.

php artisan websockets:serve --host=127.0.0.1

Restarting Server ⛓

If you use Supervisor to keep your server alive, you might want to restart it just like queue:restart does.

To do so, consider using the websockets:restart. In a maximum of 10 seconds since issuing the command, the server will be restarted.

php artisan websockets:restart

SSL Support ⛓

Since most of the web’s traffic is going through HTTPS, it’s also crucial to secure your WebSocket server. Luckily, adding SSL support to this package is really simple.

Configuration ⛓

The SSL configuration takes place in your config/websockets.php file.

The default configuration has a SSL section that looks like this:

'ssl' => [

    'local_cert' => env('LARAVEL_WEBSOCKETS_SSL_LOCAL_CERT', null),

    'capath' => env('LARAVEL_WEBSOCKETS_SSL_CA', null),

    'local_pk' => env('LARAVEL_WEBSOCKETS_SSL_LOCAL_PK', null),

    'passphrase' => env('LARAVEL_WEBSOCKETS_SSL_PASSPHRASE', null),

    'verify_peer' => env('APP_ENV') === 'production',

    'allow_self_signed' => env('APP_ENV') !== 'production',

],

But this is only a subset of all the available configuration options.

This packages makes use of the official PHP SSL context options.

So if you find yourself in the need of adding additional configuration settings, take a look at the PHP documentation and simply add the configuration parameters that you need.

After setting up your SSL settings, you can simply (re)start your WebSocket server using:

php artisan websockets:serve

Server configuration ⛓

When broadcasting events from your Pixelfed server to the WebSocket server, you also need to tell Pixelfed to make use of HTTPS instead of HTTP. You can do this by setting the PUSHER_APP_SCHEME variable to https

PUSHER_APP_SCHEME=https

Your connection from config/broadcasting.php would look like this:

'pusher' => [
    'driver' => 'pusher',
    'key' => env('PUSHER_APP_KEY'),
    'secret' => env('PUSHER_APP_SECRET'),
    'app_id' => env('PUSHER_APP_ID'),
    'options' => [
        'cluster' => env('PUSHER_APP_CLUSTER'),
        'encrypted' => true,
        'host' => env('PUSHER_APP_HOST', '127.0.0.1'),
        'port' => env('PUSHER_APP_PORT', 6001),
        'scheme' => env('PUSHER_APP_SCHEME', 'http'),
    ],
],

Since the SSL configuration can vary quite a lot, depending on your setup, let’s take a look at the most common approaches.

Usage with a reverse proxy (like Nginx) ⛓

Alternatively, you can also use a proxy service - like Nginx, HAProxy or Caddy - to handle the SSL configurations and proxy all requests in plain HTTP to your echo server.

A basic Nginx configuration would look like this, but you might want to tweak the SSL parameters to your liking.

server {
  listen        443 ssl;
  listen        [::]:443 ssl;
  server_name   socket.yourapp.tld;

  # Start the SSL configurations
  ssl                  on;
  ssl_certificate      /etc/letsencrypt/live/socket.yourapp.tld/fullchain.pem;
  ssl_certificate_key  /etc/letsencrypt/live/socket.yourapp.tld/privkey.pem;

  location / {
    proxy_pass             http://127.0.0.1:6001;
    proxy_read_timeout     60;
    proxy_connect_timeout  60;
    proxy_redirect         off;

    # Allow the use of websockets
    proxy_http_version 1.1;
    proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
    proxy_set_header Connection 'upgrade';
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade;
  }
}

You can now talk HTTPS to socket.yourapp.tld. You would configure your config/broadcasting.php like the example above, treating your socket server as an https endpoint.

Same location for websockets and web contents ⛓

To have the websockets be served at the same location and port as your other web content, Nginx can be taught to map incoming requests based on their type to special sub-locations.

map $http_upgrade $type {
  default "web";
  websocket "ws";
}

server {
  # Your default configuration comes here...

  location / {
    try_files /nonexistent @$type;
  }

  location @web {
    try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
  }

  location @ws {
    proxy_pass             http://127.0.0.1:6001;
    proxy_set_header Host  $host;
    proxy_read_timeout     60;
    proxy_connect_timeout  60;
    proxy_redirect         off;

    # Allow the use of websockets
    proxy_http_version 1.1;
    proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
    proxy_set_header Connection 'upgrade';
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade;
  }
}

This configuration is useful if you do not want to open multiple ports or you are restricted to which ports are already opened on your server. Alternatively, a second Nginx location can be used on the server-side, while the Pusher configuration wsPath can be used on the client-side (note: "pusher-js": ">=4.2.2" is required for this configuration option).

server {
  # Your default configuration comes here...

  location /ws {
    proxy_pass             http://127.0.0.1:6001;
    proxy_set_header Host  $host;
    proxy_read_timeout     60;
    proxy_connect_timeout  60;
    proxy_redirect         off;

    # Allow the use of websockets
    proxy_http_version 1.1;
    proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
    proxy_set_header Connection 'upgrade';
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade;
  }
}

Nginx worker connections ⛓

Note that you might need to increase the amount of worker_connections in Nginx. Your WebSocket connections will now be sent to Nginx, which in turn will send those along to the websocket server.

By default, that will have a sane limit of 1024 connections. If you are expecting more concurrent connections to your WebSockets, you can increase this in your global nginx.conf.

events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}

You know you’ve reached this limit of your Nginx error logs contain similar messages to these:

[alert] 1024 worker_connections are not enough while connecting to upstream

Remember to restart your Nginx after you’ve modified the worker_connections.

Example using Caddy v2 ⛓

Caddy can also be used to automatically obtain a TLS certificate from Let’s Encrypt and terminate TLS before proxying to your websocket server.

An example configuration would look like this:

socket.yourapp.tld {
    @ws {
        header Connection *Upgrade*
        header Upgrade    websocket
    }
    reverse_proxy @ws 127.0.0.1:6001
}

Note that you should change 127.0.0.1 to the hostname of your websocket server. For example, if you’re running in a Docker environment, this might be the container name of your websocket server.

Deploying ⛓

When your application is ready to get deployed, here are some tips to improve your WebSocket server.

Open Connection Limit ⛓

On Unix systems, every user that connects to your WebSocket server is represented as a file somewhere on the system. As a security measurement of every Unix based OS, the number of “file descriptors” an application may have open at a time is limited - most of the time to a default value of 1024 - which would result in a maximum number of 1024 concurrent users on your WebSocket server.

In addition to the OS restrictions, this package makes use of an event loop called “stream_select”, which has a hard limit of 1024.

Increasing the maximum number of file descriptors ⛓

The operating system limit of open “file descriptors” can be increased using the ulimit command. The -n option modifies the number of open file descriptors.

ulimit -n 10000

The ulimit command only temporarily increases the maximum number of open file descriptors. To permanently modify this value, you can edit it in your operating system limits.conf file.

You are best to do so by creating a file in the limits.d directory. This will work for both Red Hat & Ubuntu derivatives.

$ cat /etc/security/limits.d/laravel-echo.conf
laravel-echo        soft        nofile      10000

The above example assumes you will run your echo server as the laravel-echo user, you are free to change that to your liking.

Changing the event loop ⛓

To make use of a different event loop, that does not have a hard limit of 1024 concurrent connections, you can either install the ev or event PECL extension using:

sudo pecl install ev
# or
sudo pecl install event

Deploying on Laravel Forge ⛓

If your are using Laravel Forge for the deployment this article by Alex Bouma might help you out.

Keeping the socket server running with supervisord ⛓

The websockets:serve daemon needs to always be running in order to accept connections. This is a prime use case for supervisor, a task runner on Linux.

First, make sure supervisor is installed.

# On Debian / Ubuntu
apt install supervisor

# On Red Hat / CentOS
yum install supervisor
systemctl enable supervisord

Once installed, add a new process that supervisor needs to keep running. You place your configurations in the /etc/supervisor/conf.d (Debian/Ubuntu) or /etc/supervisord.d (Red Hat/CentOS) directory.

Within that directory, create a new file called websockets.conf.

[program:websockets]
command=/usr/bin/php /home/laravel-echo/laravel-websockets/artisan websockets:serve
numprocs=1
autostart=true
autorestart=true
user=laravel-echo

Once created, instruct supervisor to reload its configuration files (without impacting the already running supervisor jobs).

supervisorctl update
supervisorctl start websockets

Your echo server should now be running (you can verify this with supervisorctl status). If it were to crash, supervisor will automatically restart it.

Please note that, by default, just like file descriptiors, supervisor will force a maximum number of open files onto all the processes that it manages. This is configured by the minfds parameter in supervisord.conf.

If you want to increase the maximum number of open files, you may do so in /etc/supervisor/supervisord.conf (Debian/Ubuntu) or /etc/supervisord.conf (Red Hat/CentOS):

[supervisord]
minfds=10240; (min. avail startup file descriptors;default 1024)

After changing this setting, you’ll need to restart the supervisor process (which in turn will restart all your processes that it manages).

Cloudflare ⛓

In some cases, you might use Cloudflare and notice that your production server does not seem to respond to your :6001 port.

This is because Cloudflare does not seem to open ports, excepting a few of them.

To mitigate this issue, for example, you can run your server on port 2096:

php artisan websockets:serve --port=2096

You will notice that the new :2096 websockets server will work properly.