Integration with RoadRunner PHP application server?

[KT Walrus]

Have you investigated at all running IPS4 using the RoadRunner PHP application server?

If not, I would appreciate some IPS dev looking into it. With RoadRunner you might be able to package IPS4 in a docker image for easy deployment using containers (or even directly on a Linux/Windows/Mac server).

RoadRunner supports standards such as PSR-7 and gRPC for communicating between the server and the PHP application. Also, it is open source:

https://github.com/spiral/roadrunner

I think this might allow your customers that can run a Go binary (which is just about everyone) to get an Invision Community site installed and ready for ACP configuration in just minutes. And, the admin wouldn't need to worry about setting up NGINX/PHP-FPM just to serve an Invision Community site.

I haven't tried RoadRunner myself yet, but ran across it today when I was searching for a gRPC server for transcoding videos for my site. Seems like a good solution to running any PHP app, so I posted this question here.

 

[bfarber]

I would be surprised if there was much demand for this. I think setting up nginx and PHP is going to be easier and more common for the typical admin vs Go + Roadrunner. But, I see you posted a feedback topic so we'll see what kind of response it gets and evaluate from there.

[KT Walrus]

Go apps are completely portable and are statically linked so you don't have to install any libraries for Go apps to run. This is why the language is so good for writing a PHP application server like RoadRunner.

I realize that your customers will not demand RoadRunner support unless you give it to them with an IPS4 PSR-7 gateway. But, if IPS does this, I'm pretty sure it would become the best way to deploy IPS4 since the app would be completely integrated into RoadRunner as one package to install.

9 hours ago, bfarber said:

I think setting up nginx and PHP is going to be easier and more common for the typical admin vs Go + Roadrunner.

I have to disagree with you here. If IPS4 is shipped as a RoadRunner app, there won't be any configuration that is needed to be done by "the typical admin". The integration would be shipped with IPS4 source code (as PHP source with a standard RoadRunner config).

 

[KT Walrus]

I've looked a bit more into RoadRunner and while I initially thought it had great promise, it does require that IPS devs implement a PSR-7 HTTPS interface to IPS4. I don't know how hard that would be, but apparently PSR-7 is built into PHP and is PHP's answer to routing application requests/responses back to the app server. RoadRunner also supports gRPC so IPS devs might want to provide a gRPC API to IPS4 instead of PSR-7.

Anyway, I've emailed the CTO for Spiral Scout and will post if I get any reply. It looks to me like RoadRunner was built for Spiral Scout to deploy custom PHP apps for their customers and not as much to replace NGINX/PHP-FPM for already written apps. The apps served with RoadRunner need to have one of the supported interfaces like PSR-7 or gRPC.