CLI Installation

Prerequisites

You can avoid this configurational step by using the Docker installation process.

Soketi is based on uWebSocket.js, a Node.js-based WebSocket server, transpiled from C language.

Before installing the CLI version, make sure you have the required dependencies to build soketi:

• Python 3.x

• GIT

• The gcc compiler and the dependencies for build

Installing

Due to uWebSocket.js limitations, Soketi does not work on CentOS 7, but it works on CentOS 8. Check the Github issue.

The following example works for Ubuntu. For other distributions, consider using the equivalents.

apt install -y git python3 gcc build-essential

Installing with NPM

Node.js LTS (14.x, 16.x, so on) is required due to uWebSockets.js build limitations.

soketi may be easily installed via the NPM CLI:

npm install -g @soketi/soketi

After installation, a soketi server using the default configuration may be started using the start command:

soketi start

By default, this will start a server at 127.0.0.1:6001 with the following application credentials:

• App ID: app-id

• App Key: app-key

• Secret: app-secret

The credentials are used to authenticate your frontend and backend applications in order to be able to send messages and receive them in real time.

What to do next

• Explore the installation process recommendations below

• Learn how to configure the SSL

• Learn how to configure the frontend client

• Learn how to configure the backend

• Learn how to customize the applications' credentials for better security

Supervisor

To keep the soketi server alive permanently, you should consider installing a process manager such as supervisor, a daemon that can run and restart processes in the background. After installing Supervisor, you may use the following example configuration as a good starting point for launching a soketi server:

[program:soketi]
process_name=%(program_name)s_%(process_num)02d
command=soketi start
autostart=true
autorestart=true
stopasgroup=true
killasgroup=true
user=ubuntu
numprocs=1
redirect_stderr=true
stdout_logfile=/var/log/soketi-supervisor.log
stopwaitsecs=60
stopsignal=sigint
minfds=10240

As you can see in the configuration above, a single soketi server will be started, and this server will auto-restart on failure. Logs will be written to /var/log/soketi-supervisor.log.

It's important to note that the stopwaitsecs and stopsignal configuration options should be set as in the example above. If necessary, you can increase stopwaitsecs to a larger value. This is the number of seconds Supervisor will allow soketi to gracefully close all connections when the server is stopping or restarting.

In Linux environments, everything is a file, including active sockets. To track socket connections, soketi is creating file descriptor for each connection. In some cases, you may run into a soft limit on file descriptors set by your operating system. In this situation, you can set the Supervisor minfds configuration option to a higher value to allow the operating system to handle more connections.

Scaling across threads with PM2

Node.js is meant to be ran on one CPU at a given time. This means that multi-threading isn't actually multi-threading in its common sense. To fix this problem, you may use the PM2-ready binary that is shipped with any soketi installation:

pm2 start soketi-pm2 -- start

The only remaining caveat is that the processes are like they are horizontally scaled. You may want to configure horizontal scaling with the cluster adapter, unless you are also scaling across multiple different instances, in which Redis is the recommended adapter.