This project is now archived - feel free to use it as an example as per "The files of interest" below but please do not use this on a live environment due to security issues with Laravel 5.2

Example Real-Time "Auction" Laravel (5.2) App

Note: This is not a working auction site. It's an example of one way to use real-time websockets to notify users of your site that something's happened.

Working example site (If this isn't updating it's because I've forgot to restart socket.js - hit me up and I'll restart it)

• Set up your .env file to suit your setup, create your DB etc. (don't change the things from redis that are set to redis)
• composer install
• php artisan migrate
• npm install - we pull in ioredis and socket.io node packages
• php artisan db:seed - sets up your item categories
• node socket.js - although you may want to run this using "forever" or something if you want to keep it running - up to you.

Hit your site in the browser and set up 3 users (user 2 and 3 will be offered as auto-login accounts for playing with) To disable this functionality remove the fakeLogin() method from the HomeController or remove the last route(named loginAs) in routes.php

You can then add some items as you please and play around with how it ties together.

The files of interest are:

• resources/views/layouts/app.blade.php - this pulls in socket.io from a cdn, you'll need socket.io for this to work.
• resource/views/items/show.blade.php and resource/views/home.blade.php - particularly at the bottom where these files push to the scripts stack. This is where the listening for events takes place.
• socket.js this script runs your node server and sets up all the websockets and redis stuff.
• app/Controllers/BidController.php - accepts bids and broadcasts them to redis

The socket.js file listens for anything on the bids-channel channel and requires a data.item_id property be passed in from the server. It then emits (pushes) messages to the listeners on that bids-channel[item_id] channel. (see the data we send in app/Events/BidReceived.php - Laravel pushes any public properties on an event as part of the data object) This allows us to use one server-side socket to listen for broadcasts but emit to different channels on the client end.