ReactPHP + WebSockets (Ratchet) + ReactJs = REATCHAT!

This is something I wrote really fast during one of the talks at PHPConference 2016 in Sydney. I was inspired by a talk about asynchronous PHP by Wim Goddin which you can check out here.

WebSockets and PHP is something I'd already been interested in and had been wanting to get into a bit more deeply after playing around with pub/sub and Firebase. After the talk I was pretty amped so I decided to just dive in and give it a go right away.

Naturally I wrote the front end in ReactJs!

This was also loosely based off this SitePoint tutorial which you can check out for further explanations.

Guide

Not much too it really, just pull or download the repo and put its contents somewhere on your webserver. Run composer update inside the server directory, then navigate to http://yourserver.com/reatchat and ask a buddy to come along with you to get chatting! If you don't have any friends then you can open the app in two tabs and talk to yourself.

In a real use case, you would probably put the Ratchet app on a separate server, but that's beyond the scope of this repo.

License

Copyright (c) 2016 Rohan Deshpande and other contributors

Licensed under the MIT License