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Brickhouse

Rebound

Rebound provides your application with real-time capabilities, allowing you to handle events, send updates to your users, or broadcast messages. Rebound supports WebSockets as it’s transport layer, making communications between client and server bidirectional.

Rebound can be used for a multitude of applications, such as instant messaging, updating the frontend with new pricing, video game leaderboards, and more.

Installation

Rebound can be installed via Composer:

Terminal window
composer require brickhouse/rebound

The Moving Parts

After installing Rebound, you can mount it in your applications routes:

routes/app.php
Rebound::mount('ws', \App\Controllers\ReboundController::class);

In this example, /ws is routed the controller ReboundController, which is defined as:

src/Controllers/ReboundController.php
namespace App\Controllers;


use Brickhouse\Http\Controller;
use Brickhouse\Http\Response;
use Brickhouse\Rebound\Websocket\WebsocketClient;


final class ReboundController extends Controller
{
    /**
     * Renders a streamed response to the user.
     *
     * @return Response
     */
    public function __invoke(WebsocketClient $client): void
    {
        // Wait for the client to send a message
        foreach ($client as $message) {
            // Send back the message from the client.
            $client->send($message);
        }
    }
}

This controller will, in essence, echo everything the client sends back to the client. While not itself useful, it allows for much more complex applications.

You may have noticed the WebsocketClient parameter. This instance was injected via the dependency injection container, allowing us to read and write to the client.

Running the server

To start the Rebound server, run the following command:

Terminal window
php brickhouse rebound:serve

By default, Rebound starts listening on 127.0.0.1:9000. This is mainly for development and testing purposes, as only the local machine will be able to access it.

If you need to specify a custom host or port, you can do so with the --host and --port options when starting the server:

Terminal window
php brickhouse rebound:serve --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8030

Alternatively, you may define the REBOUND_SERVER_HOST and REBOUND_SERVER_PORT environment variables. Be aware, these environment variables are only used if the server was started without those options. This means that the parameters given to the command will take precedence.