What is Workerman Chat used for?

Workerman Chat is a free, MIT-licensed, high-performance PHP WebSocket chat room built on the Workerman and GatewayWorker frameworks, supporting distributed deployment. It is a good fit for learning PHP WebSocket chat architecture and starting point for a distributed chat room.

Is Workerman Chat open source?

Yes. Workerman Chat is open source under the MIT licence. Its source code is on GitHub at walkor/workerman-chat and is written mainly in PHP.

Is Workerman Chat free?

Yes. Workerman Chat is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

Can I self-host Workerman Chat?

Yes. Workerman Chat can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.

What are some alternatives to Workerman Chat?

Similar open-source tools in the Team Chat category include The Lounge, Campfire and Cinny. SaaS products in the same category include Kik, TeamSpeak and Telegram.

Is Workerman Chat actively maintained?

The most recent commit to Workerman Chat was on 12 August 2023. The project has 1.2k stars on GitHub.

Workerman Chat: open-source team chat

About Workerman Chat

Workerman Chat is an open-source chat room application built in PHP on top of the Workerman asynchronous event-driven framework, specifically using its GatewayWorker component. It is aimed at PHP developers who want a working example or starting point for a real-time, distributed chat system without adopting a different language's runtime for WebSocket handling.

It communicates over the WebSocket protocol, supports any browser capable of HTML5 or Flash, and offers multiple chat rooms, private messaging between users, automatic reconnection on disconnect, automatic parsing of Weibo image links, and support for Weibo-style emoticons in chat content. Business logic is deliberately kept in a single file, Applications/Chat/Event.php, making it straightforward to read through and adapt as a starting point. The system is also designed to support deployment across multiple servers for scaling beyond a single machine.

Installation is done by cloning the repository and running composer install, after which the application can be started in debug or daemon mode on Linux, or via a batch file on Windows, noting that stop, reload and status commands are not available on Windows. Workerman Chat is written in PHP and released under the MIT license.

Key features

WebSocket-based real-time chat rooms
Private messaging between users
Automatic reconnection on disconnect
Weibo image and emoticon parsing
Multi-server distributed deployment support
Business logic concentrated in a single file

Good fit for

→Learning PHP WebSocket chat architecture
→Starting point for a distributed chat room

Built with: PHP
Tags: chat; websocket; php; workerman; self-hosted; real-time

Workerman Chat: questions and answers

What is Workerman Chat used for?: Workerman Chat is a free, MIT-licensed, high-performance PHP WebSocket chat room built on the Workerman and GatewayWorker frameworks, supporting distributed deployment. It is a good fit for learning PHP WebSocket chat architecture and starting point for a distributed chat room.
Is Workerman Chat open source?: Yes. Workerman Chat is open source under the MIT licence. Its source code is on GitHub at walkor/workerman-chat and is written mainly in PHP.
Is Workerman Chat free?: Yes. Workerman Chat is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
Can I self-host Workerman Chat?: Yes. Workerman Chat can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.
What are some alternatives to Workerman Chat?: Similar open-source tools in the Team Chat category include The Lounge, Campfire and Cinny. SaaS products in the same category include Kik, TeamSpeak and Telegram.
Is Workerman Chat actively maintained?: The most recent commit to Workerman Chat was on 12 August 2023. The project has 1.2k stars on GitHub.