---
title: Deploying
order: 1
---

# Deploying

When your application is ready to get deployed, here are some tips to improve your WebSocket server.

### Open Connection Limit

On Unix systems, every user that connects to your WebSocket server is represented as a file somewhere on the system.
As a security measurement of every Unix based OS, the number of "file descriptors" an application may have open at a time is limited - most of the time to a default value of 1024 - which would result in a maximum number of 1024 concurrent users on your WebSocket server.

In addition to the OS restrictions, this package makes use of an event loop called "stream_select", which has a hard limit of 1024.

#### Increasing the maximum number of file descriptors

The operating system limit of open "file descriptors" can be increased using the `ulimit` command. The `-n` option modifies the number of open file descriptors.

```bash
ulimit -n 10000
```

The `ulimit` command only **temporarily** increases the maximum number of open file descriptors. To permanently modify this value, you can edit it in your operating system `limits.conf` file.

You are best to do so by creating a file in the `limits.d` directory. This will work for both Red Hat & Ubuntu derivatives.

```bash
$ cat /etc/security/limits.d/laravel-echo.conf
laravel-echo		soft		nofile		10000
```

The above example assumes you will run your echo server as the `laravel-echo` user, you are free to change that to your liking.

#### Changing the event loop

To make use of a different event loop, that does not have a hard limit of 1024 concurrent connections, you can either install the `ev` or `event` PECL extension using:

```bash
sudo pecl install ev
# or
sudo pecl install event
```

#### Deploying on Laravel Forge

If your are using [Laravel Forge](https://forge.laravel.com/) for the deployment [this article by Alex Bouma](https://alex.bouma.dev/installing-laravel-websockets-on-forge) might help you out.

## Keeping the socket server running with supervisord

The `websockets:serve` daemon needs to always be running in order to accept connections. This is a prime use case for `supervisor`, a task runner on Linux.

First, make sure `supervisor` is installed.

```bash
# On Debian / Ubuntu
apt install supervisor

# On Red Hat / CentOS
yum install supervisor
systemctl enable supervisord
```

Once installed, add a new process that `supervisor` needs to keep running. You place your configurations in the `/etc/supervisor/conf.d` (Debian/Ubuntu) or `/etc/supervisord.d` (Red Hat/CentOS) directory.

Within that directory, create a new file called `websockets.conf`.

```bash
[program:websockets]
command=/usr/bin/php /home/laravel-echo/laravel-websockets/artisan websockets:serve
numprocs=1
autostart=true
autorestart=true
user=laravel-echo
```

Once created, instruct `supervisor` to reload its configuration files (without impacting the already running `supervisor` jobs).

```bash
supervisorctl update
supervisorctl start websockets
```

Your echo server should now be running (you can verify this with `supervisorctl status`). If it were to crash, `supervisor` will automatically restart it.

Please note that, by default, just like file descriptiors,  `supervisor` will force a maximum number of open files onto all the processes that it manages. This is configured by the `minfds` parameter in `supervisord.conf`.

If you want to increase the maximum number of open files, you may do so in `/etc/supervisor/supervisord.conf` (Debian/Ubuntu) or `/etc/supervisord.conf` (Red Hat/CentOS):

```
[supervisord]
minfds=10240; (min. avail startup file descriptors;default 1024)
```

After changing this setting, you'll need to restart the supervisor process (which in turn will restart all your processes that it manages).

## Debugging supervisor

If you run into issues with Supervisor, like not supporting a lot of connections, consider checking the [Ratched docs on deploying with Supervisor](http://socketo.me/docs/deploy#supervisor).