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.

Not every fix in ePHPm earns a full write-up. A few of the smaller ones have stuck with me because the lesson in each was bigger than the diff. Here are four from this summer.

Back in 2023 I wrote up how go-proxmox logs in and ended it with a shrug. Once a session existed the client never logged in again. A ticket-based client died at the two hour mark. My advice was “use an API token for anything long running”. It took until this month to fix that properly. It took three PRs from two of us to get there. Here’s the whole arc, plus the one place where an API token isn’t an option at all.

Part of a hobby of mine is running a home lab and using on Proxmox VE to do the virtualization. Since I work in the space I’m slowly trying to build tooling around Proxmox that will let me use the home lab full time for work. Usually my work involves building Kubernetes management tooling. You can imagine waiting for public cloud APIs all day can take away hours of your day. That’s at cost to your employer for both your time and the compute resources.