LR Warble makes Flarum's Realtime extension work on any hosting, including shared hosting where you can't run a websocket server. New posts, typing indicators and notifications reach your visitors a few seconds after they happen, and all it needs is your forum.
How it works
Flarum's Realtime extension does the live work: new posts, typing indicators, notifications and discussion-list updates. Normally it needs a websocket server running next to your forum. Warble swaps that for polling: each visitor's browser asks your forum for new updates every few seconds.
- Hidden tabs stop asking, idle tabs ask less often, and every wait is slightly random so tabs never all ask at once.
- Old updates clean themselves up, so there's no cron job.
- Typing indicators respect privacy. A member who hides their online status is never named to someone who isn't allowed to see it.
No settings
There's no key, no server address and no interval to set. Warble measures how long polls take on your host and picks the interval for you: every 3 seconds on a quiet forum, stretching to 30 seconds if polling would keep your server too busy. It slows down at once when your host struggles and speeds back up when there's room.
Its admin page shows a Realtime health checklist of everything it depends on, as your forum sees it right now, with a Check again button.
What to expect
Updates arrive a few seconds late rather than instantly, and each open tab makes one small request per interval. That suits small and mid-size communities, which are exactly the ones that can't run a websocket server. If you outgrow it and can keep a process running on your server, switch Warble off and use Realtime's own websocket server instead.
It's free, and it doesn't depend on any outside service.
Requirements
- Flarum 2.0 or later, PHP 8.3+
flarum/realtime (Composer installs it for you)
Install
composer require linkrobins/flarum-warble
Then enable Realtime and LR Warble under Admin, Extensions. That's it.
Source: linkrobins/warble
Packagist: https://packagist.org/packages/linkrobins/flarum-warble
Every release is posted below.
