PHP Rust Process Manager (php-rpm)

An experimental process manager that uses Rust's hyper library to act as a frontend for PHP.

Problem

The standard way to run PHP is to use nginx + php_fpm. Not only is this a pain to setup, but FastCGI is not very fast.

Solution

Embed PHP into Rust so that hyper can accept the HTTP request, spawn a thread in which we pass that information off to a PHP script and then have hyper return the HTTP response.

Installation

This package depends on PHP. The default location for the PHP includes is in /usr/include/php. You can set an environment variable PHP_INCLUDE_DIR to override this. The default location for libphp7 is in /usr/lib. You can set an environment variable PHP_LIB_DIR to override this. For details on how to install or compile PHP, see php-sys/README.md. Please note that in order to safely spawn threads with PHP, --enable-maintainer-zts must be used.

The code uses bindgen to dynamically build bindings for PHP 7. If you want to compile against a static libphp7, then specify PHP_LINK_STATIC=1. Using cargo build should give you a working binary.

Usage

Depending on the location of libphp7 you may need to provide LD_LIBRARY_PATH. The first argument to the program is the document root. Currently the index is hardcoded to index.php. Example: PHP_LIB_DIR="/path/to/lib" PHP_INCLUDE_DIR="/path/to/include" LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/path/to/lib" cargo run -- tests/. This will send requests to a script in ./tests/index.php.

The tests/index.php is the entry point of the PHP program. A hyper server listens for new requests and dispatches each request to the PHP engine, which executes tests/index.php. The response headers and body are sent back through hyper and then to the client.

Inspiration

I thought of this idea while working on weldr and thinking about how weldr would be used at my day job (which uses PHP).

Related

See php_fpm.

Thanks

A big thanks to Sara Goleman and her book Extending and Embedding PHP. Also thanks to the people that created bindgen.

License

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT) at your option.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.