Laravel Sail with HTTPS Swoole

Published in

Dev Genius

5 min readJul 7, 2021

Most of the PHP applications are hosted either in LAMP or LEMP stack, Nginx+PHP-FPM combo is fast, easy to configure, and popular nowadays. However, the game-changer for PHP has arisen — Swoole. It brings us Asynchronous Capability, Real Multithreading, and Superb Concurrency Performance for PHP!

Victor Gazotti & Eldad A. Fux tested it with 80% ~ 91% of performance gain! It sounds like PHP on steroids!

📝 If you are a newcomer, feel free to read Kickstart your Laravel Web App using Laravel Sail.

The official Laravel documentation does not provide the method (currently not supported yet) for setting up Swoole in HTTPS mode.

The following steps will guide you in setting up Octane with Swoole Server with HTTPS 🚀🚀🚀!

0. Create Your Laravel Project

Just a quick note for creating a blank project, you may read the tutorial here.

cd ~/codecurl -s https://laravel.build/test-project | bashcd test-projectsail up -d

1. Install Laravel Octane

Install the Laravel Octane with

sail composer require laravel/octane

and then

sail artisan octane:install

Use code . command open the VS Code.

1.1 Octane Config File

✏️ Append/Edit in config/octane.php file

Setting up the necessary options for HTTPS protocols, the SSL cert and key will be generated by the commands in the Dockerfile. You can turn on/off the HTTPS SSL functionality by changing the value of enable-openssl then restarting the containers.

2. Setting ENV file

✏️ Append in .env file

Use Swoole as the Octane server. The flag OCTANE_HTTPS is not turning on the SSL functionality, it is just about the URL prefix, you can read this.

3. Keep Swoole Up and Running

I am going to use Laravel Octane to replace the PHP built-in HTTP server, we need to always keep Octane up and running.

I need to customize our Sail by publishing the config files:

sail artisan sail:publish

So, ✏️update docker/8.0/supervisord.conf (Line 8) as stated in official documentation.

Octane has to restart in order to apply your file changes, so I also turn on the --watch flag in the command above. However, make sure you install the Chokidar file-watching library too, you can read more about in official docs.

sail npm install --save-dev chokidar

4. Docker Config

A. ✏️ Append in docker-compose.yml file, ports section (~Line 13)

I need to map the port 8000 to public

In order to make every configuration above function properly, I need to modify the docker/8.0/Dockerfile.

B. ✏️Append lines for SSL self-signed Cert with proper folder permission

You have to update the latest sail version (> v1.8.4) which include the package
php8.0-swoole from apt without pecl

After sail user creation (~Line 47) —
RUN useradd -ms /bin/bash — no-user-group -g $WWWGROUP -u 1337 sail

add these lines…

The resulting Dockerfile :

5. Re-build Container

Shutdown your container with sail down then re-build with

sail build --no-cache

6. Testing

Your Swoole should be up and running, you may check with

sail artisan octane:status

and also open the browser and enter https://localhost:8000, you should open the Laravel Welcome page with HTTPS.

I also run the test using ab, to find out how much performance gain…

ab -n 10000 -c 512 -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate" https://localhost:8000/

Result:

Server Software:        swoole-http-server
Server Hostname:        localhost
Server Port:            8000
SSL/TLS Protocol:       TLSv1.2,ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384,2048,256
Server Temp Key:        X25519 253 bits
TLS Server Name:        localhostDocument Path:          /
Document Length:        17503 bytesConcurrency Level:      512
Time taken for tests:   97.184 seconds
Complete requests:      10000
Failed requests:        0
Total transferred:      185930000 bytes
HTML transferred:       175030000 bytes
Requests per second:    102.90 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       4975.846 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       9.718 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          1868.33 [Kbytes/sec] receivedConnection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        2   30  96.9      3     633
Processing:    56 4794 2417.4   4598   19666
Waiting:       17 4791 2418.0   4586   19665
Total:         60 4824 2403.2   4613   19668Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%   4613
  66%   5592
  75%   6085
  80%   6398
  90%   7509
  95%   8599
  98%  10384
  99%  12929
 100%  19668 (longest request)

As the baseline: the default PHP built-in server

ab -n 10000 -c 512 -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate" http://localhost/

Result:

Server Software:
Server Hostname:        localhost
Server Port:            80Document Path:          /
Document Length:        17490 bytesConcurrency Level:      512
Time taken for tests:   198.809 seconds
Complete requests:      10000
Failed requests:        0
Total transferred:      186310000 bytes
HTML transferred:       174900000 bytes
Requests per second:    50.30 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       10179.014 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       19.881 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          915.17 [Kbytes/sec] receivedConnection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    0   1.4      0       9
Processing:    26 9913 1863.2  10041   13891
Waiting:       15 9912 1863.2  10041   13890
Total:         28 9913 1862.1  10041   13891Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%  10041
  66%  10549
  75%  11006
  80%  11085
  90%  11833
  95%  12221
  98%  12640
  99%  13391
 100%  13891 (longest request)

Conclude the results

You can see the request per second is improved more than 100% 🤩! The total time is taken and time/request is also halved! This Swoole is just taking the default settings, you can fine-tune it base on your requirements to achieve a more desirable result!

Video Demo:

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