Starting the WebSocket server

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

php artisan websockets:serve

Using a different port#

The default port of the Laravel 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 Laravel 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

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, 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).