PHP Async Calls

What it is

Delegate code to the Async class to manage and fork off into a new process. Useful for executing block of code which takes less than desirable amount of time to complete - but which you don't need to know the result of. Api calls, heavy IO interaction and running maintenance are some uses for this.

Warning

This is in the vary early stages of development and executing code can be a difficult thing to achieve securely. Therefore, for the time being, it's not advisable to use this on a production system.

How to use

1. Add the library to Composer:

   "require": {
      "eddturtle/php-async-calls": "dev-master"
   }
   

2. Run sudo composer update in your repository
3. Include the Composer autloader file: require "vendor/autoload.php";

4. Start an Async queue:

   $async = new Async();
   $async->queue("sleep(10);");
   

   Running this in your browser should load the page in <100ms.

Note: the queue will be processed once everything else on the page has been run, but can be kicked off manually by destroying the object (aka, by $async = null)

Options

Currently there 5 options available. This shows the possible options you can pass into the Async() constructor and their default settings.

• 'debug' => false If set to true, will also print out info, like what commands are being run.
• 'type' => self::TYPE_PHP Has the option of running PHP directly or raw (TYPE_RAW) to run commands directly.
• 'async' => true You can turn off async (useful for testing and seeing the affect).
• 'tmp-dir' => '/tmp/' The directory to store temp files, needs write access.
• 'cleanup' => true Whether to clean up the tmp-dir after it's been used.

In the pipeline (future work)

• Work closely with curl requests.
• Logging to check result.

Licence

Licenced under the MIT Licence, as attached in the project.