Serve Shlink using openswoole

Shlink can be served using openswoole.

It provides a non-blocking I/O server, similar to the one used for node.js applications, which lets web apps to be run once and kept in memory while serving requests.

openswoole is quite fast, and has a few extra benefits (like running some heavy tasks immediately after a request has been served).

In order to use openswoole, you have to install the openswoole PHP extension using Pecl: pecl install openswoole-22.0.0.

After that, you can serve Shlink with php vendor/bin/laminas mezzio:swoole:start.

Shlink as a system service

Since you probably don’t want to manually start Shlink every time, this explains how to set it up as a Daemon in Linux.

First you need to create a daemon script, in /etc/init.d/shlink_swoole.

You can use this sample, replacing /path/to/shlink by the path to your shlink installation:

#!/bin/bash
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          shlink_openswoole
# Required-Start:    $local_fs $network $named $time $syslog
# Required-Stop:     $local_fs $network $named $time $syslog
# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop:      0 1 6
# Description:       Shlink non-blocking server with openswoole
### END INIT INFO

SCRIPT=/path/to/shlink/vendor/bin/laminas\ mezzio:swoole:start
RUNAS=root

PIDFILE=/var/run/shlink_openswoole.pid
LOGDIR=/var/log/shlink
LOGFILE=${LOGDIR}/shlink_openswoole.log

start() {
  if [[ -f "$PIDFILE" ]] && kill -0 $(cat "$PIDFILE"); then
    echo 'Shlink with openswoole already running' >&2
    return 1
  fi
  echo 'Starting shlink with openswoole' >&2
  mkdir -p "$LOGDIR"
  touch "$LOGFILE"
  local CMD="$SCRIPT &> \"$LOGFILE\" & echo \$!"
  su -c "$CMD" $RUNAS > "$PIDFILE"
  echo 'Shlink started' >&2
}

stop() {
  if [[ ! -f "$PIDFILE" ]] || ! kill -0 $(cat "$PIDFILE"); then
    echo 'Shlink with openswoole not running' >&2
    return 1
  fi
  echo 'Stopping shlink with openswoole' >&2
  kill -15 $(cat "$PIDFILE") && rm -f "$PIDFILE"
  echo 'Shlink stopped' >&2
}

case "$1" in
  start)
    start
    ;;
  stop)
    stop
    ;;
  restart)
    stop
    start
    ;;
  *)
    echo "Usage: $0 {start|stop|restart}"
esac

Then run these commands to enable the service and start it:

• sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/shlink_swoole
• sudo update-rc.d shlink_swoole defaults
• sudo update-rc.d shlink_swoole enable
• /etc/init.d/shlink_swoole start

After that, you should be able to access shlink on port 8080. The service will be automatically run at system start-up, and all access logs will be written in /var/log/shlink/shlink_swoole.log.

Exposing Shlink through a reverse proxy

Event though previous steps are enough to make Shlink usable, there are still a couple of missing things to make it production-ready.

Follow the instructions to configure a reverse proxy in front of Shlink.