Symfony2 AppServer-in-PHP Bundle

Enables running Symfony2 applications with the AppServer-in-PHP (AiP). AiP simplifies application deployment greatly by not requiring a normal web server, and makes Symfony2 operations more efficient by keeping the framework persistent between requests.

Users of other PHP frameworks like Midgard MVC or Flow3 have reported performance increases between 2 and 4 times faster by running their systems on AiP instead of the traditional way of serving PHP.

How it works

AiP is an application server for PHP applications that has been written in PHP itself. You can either run it as a full HTTP server, in which situation no regular web server like Apache is needed. Or you can set it up to be a FastCGI provider if you run more than just PHP on your server.

Integration with Symfony2

The AppServerBundle integrates AiP with the Symfony2 framework. The points of integration are the following:

• Your Symfony2 application is started by the aip app command, which launches the AppServerBundle Application
• The Application bootstraps Symfony2 and creates instances of the Symfony2 AppKernels configured in aip.yml
• When AiP receives a request, the __invoke method of the Application is run, generating a regular Symfony2 Request object and telling AppKernel to Handle it
• When request handling has completed the status code, headers, and contents of the Response object are passed to AiP
• AiP sends the response to the browser

Installation

Dependencies

Install AppServer-in-PHP either via PEAR:

$ pear channel-discover pear.indeyets.pp.ru
$ pear install indeyets/aip

...or by installing the AiP repository under your vendors directory. AiP requires the php-cli package to run, as it is basically a command-line PHP script.

AppServerBundle

Install this bundle under your vendors directory and add the Midgard namespace to your autoload.php. You can automate the install by adding the following to your deps file:

[AppServerBundle]
    git=http://github.com/bergie/MidgardAppServerBundle.git
    target=Midgard/AppServerBundle

Application server configuration

Copy the aip.yaml.example file from this bundle to your app directory. You can edit it as necessary. By default it sets up two workers to listen to http://localhost:8001, running your AppKernel at /.

If you have multiple application kernels, you have to configure them in your aip.yml. For example, this is how Lichess can be configured:

symfony.kernels:
  -
    path: /
    kernel: AppKernel
    kernelFile: AppKernel.php
    environment: dev
    debug: false
  -
    path: /xhr_dev.php
    kernel: XhrKernel
    kernelFile: ../xhr/XhrKernel.php
    environment: dev
    debug: false

AppServerBundle will not work with the Symfony's NativeSessionStorage implementation, so it supplies its own SessionStorage implementation. Switch to that in config.yml:

framework:
    session:
        storage_id: session.storage.aip

Usage

Start your server with:

$ aip app app/aip.yaml

Contributing

The AppServerBundle is still under heavy development, and you may still run into issues, or find things that could be optimized. Contributions for making it more reliable are very welcome.

Just fork the AppServerBundle repository on GitHub and send pull requests.

Credits

The Symfony2 AppServerBundle has been written by Henri Bergius. AppServer-in-PHP (AiP) has been written by Alexey Zakhlestin.