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Version: 4.x

FastCGI Client

A PHP FastCGI client to send requests (a)synchronously to PHP-FPM, or any other FastCGI server, using the FastCGI Protocol.

This library is based on the work of Pierrick Charron's PHP-FastCGI-Client and was ported and modernized to latest PHP versions, extended with some features for handling multiple requests (in loops) and unit and integration tests as well.

How it works​

PHP-FPM runs PHP scripts for requests it receives via FastCGI. Usually a web server sends these requests. With this library, your own PHP script does — compare both:

1/6A browser requests /index.php from the web server via HTTP.

Web servere.g. nginx or Apachegets an HTTP requestPHP-FPMworker #1idleindex.php
0.0 s
  • web server works
  • web server waits (blocked)
  • on the way over the socket
  • the script runs in PHP-FPM
Try it: change the example
Who sends the request to PHP-FPM?
nginx.conf
location ~ \.php$ {
    fastcgi_pass  127.0.0.1:9000;
    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    include       fastcgi_params;
}
Browser
→ GET /index.php HTTP/1.1

What you can do with it​

  • Execute PHP scripts through PHP-FPM without a web server in between, e.g. from CLI workers or cron jobs.
  • Send requests synchronously, or asynchronously and in parallel, and collect the responses in the order they were sent or as soon as they are ready.
  • Connect via network sockets or unix domain sockets.
  • React to responses and failures with callbacks, or stream the output of long-running scripts with pass-through callbacks.
  • Send any request method with URL-encoded, multipart (file upload), JSON or plain text content.

The library has no dependencies besides PHP itself and is continuously tested against PHP-FPM 8.0 – 8.5 as well as FastCGI servers written in Go, Rust, C# and Java.

Versions​

This is the documentation of version 4.x, which requires PHP >= 8.0.

Please have a look at the backwards incompatible changes (BC breaks) in the changelog, if you upgrade from a previous version.

VersionPHPDocumentationChangelog
4.x>= 8.0This documentationCHANGELOG.md
3.x>= 7.13.x3.x
2.x>= 7.12.x2.x
1.x>= 7.01.x1.x

Version 3.x still gets bug fixes, but no new features.

Read more about the journey to and changes in v2.6.0 in this blog post.

Background​

You can find an experimental use-case in my related blog posts:

You can also find slides of my talks about this project on speakerdeck.com.