Using Yii with RoadRunner

RoadRunner is a Golang-powered application server that integrates well with PHP. It runs it as workers and each worker may handle multiple requests. Such an operation mode is often called event loop and allows not to re-initialize a framework for each request that improves performance significantly.

Installation

RoadRunner works on Linux, macOS and Windows. The best way to install it is to use a Composer:

composer require yiisoft/yii-runner-roadrunner

After installation is done, run

./vendor/bin/rr get

That would download ready to use RoadRunner server rr binary.

Configuration

First, we need to configure the server itself. Create /.rr.yaml and add the following config:

server:
  command: "php worker.php"

rpc:
  listen: tcp://127.0.0.1:6001

http:
  address: :8080
  pool:
    num_workers: 4
    max_jobs: 64
  middleware: ["static", "headers"]
  static:
    dir:   "public"
    forbid: [".php", ".htaccess"]
  headers:
    response:
      "Cache-Control": "no-cache"

reload:
  interval: 1s
  patterns: [ ".php" ]
  services:
    http:
      recursive: true
      dirs: [ "." ]

logs:
  mode: production
  level: warn

We’re specifying that entry script is worker.php, there should be three workers on port 8080, public directory files are static ones except .php and .htaccess. Also, we’re sending additional header.

Create /worker.php:

<?php

declare(strict_types=1);


use Yiisoft\Yii\Runner\RoadRunner\RoadRunnerApplicationRunner;

ini_set('display_errors', 'stderr');

require_once __DIR__ . '/preload.php';

(new RoadRunnerApplicationRunner(__DIR__, $_ENV['YII_DEBUG'], $_ENV['YII_ENV']))->run();

Starting a server

To start a server, execute the following command:

./rr serve -d

On worker scope

• Each worker’s scope is isolated from other workers. Memory isn’t shared.
• A single worker serves multiple requests where scope is shared.
• At each iteration of event loop every service that depends on state should be reset.