A single ePHPm binary runs a whole WordPress site. No php-fpm, no Redis, no MySQL. The database is a SQLite file. I covered that setup in Zero-Dependency Deployments. It makes for a tiny blog: one process, one file, a distroless image around 270 MB. That fits a micro VM with room to spare.

ephemerd runs a fresh GitHub Actions runner per job. Some of those jobs need Docker. A workflow builds an image, runs a service container, or uses the container: key. The usual way to give a self-hosted job Docker is Docker-in-Docker, or dind.

ephemerd gives every CI job a brand new runner. A new container on Linux, a new VM on macOS and Windows. The job runs, the runner is thrown away, and the next job starts from a clean image. That is the whole point. Nothing a job does can leak into the next one.

ephemerd gives every CI job a brand new environment and throws it away after. On Linux and Windows that environment is a container. On macOS it can’t be. Apple’s license wants macOS running on Apple hardware, so the Mac in my rack is the real thing. The isolation comes from a VM instead.

ePHPm runs PHP inside a Rust server. For SQLite-style databases it uses Turso, a rewrite of SQLite in Rust that is still labeled beta. I recently hammered ePHPm’s per-site mode with brand-new sites. A burst of first requests to a new site could panic inside the engine. This post is about where that panic came from and how to fix it. How Turso got into ePHPm is in Clustered SQLite, Part 2.

We added ePHPm to the Yii3 runtime benchmark. It runs the same Yii3 API app on a bunch of PHP runtimes and compares them. Our fork with the ePHPm runner is ephpm/app-api.

The pitch for ePHPm is one binary in place of php-fpm, nginx and Redis. There was always a hole in it though. To deploy a PHP app you still need to run composer install. That drags PHP and composer.phar back onto the box or into the container build, just for that one step. ephpm composer install now runs a pure-Rust, Composer-compatible installer called vivacity inside the ePHPm binary. One binary serves the app and installs its dependencies. On Windows that works with no PHP installed at all.…

Every “build a lock on Redis” tutorial spends its time on acquisition: SET key value NX PX 30000, one winner, done. The release gets one line, DEL key. That line is where most of the lock bugs I’ve had in ePHPm lived. Over about three months the same mistake showed up in three places. First the native session handler, then two of the Composer wrapper packages, and finally the cluster. Each time it wore a slightly different costume.

Persistent workers are the big performance win in modern PHP. You boot Laravel or Symfony once, keep the container in memory, and serve thousands of requests out of the same process. ePHPm has had a worker mode for a while. Like most worker runtimes it had a quiet hole in it. You couldn’t step debug a request with Xdebug. I wanted that fixed without patching Xdebug and without giving up the warm pool. The answer ended up being to stop fighting the constraint and route around it. The debug…

I covered the design of ePHPm’s native WebSockets in a few paragraphs of the odds and ends post. Rust owns the socket and PHP runs once per event. An idle connection never costs you a PHP thread. That was the why. This post is the how. We’ll build a small chat app with login, per-user push notifications from ordinary HTTP requests and a browser client. Then we’ll serve it over TLS. Last come the limits, the sharp edges and how to debug it when the browser only tells you 1006.