Broadcasting

Introduction

Masonite understands the developer need for building modern web applications so Masonite 1.4+ ships with WebSocket support. With a new Service Provider, configuration file and support for the pusher and ably drivers out of the box, we can now have full web socket support quickly and easily.

Configuration

All broadcasting configuration is located in the config/broadcast.py file. There are only two options: DRIVER and DRIVERS. The DRIVER should hold the value of the driver you want to use such as pusher:

DRIVER = 'pusher'

and DRIVERS should hold the configuration data:

DRIVERS = {
    'pusher': {
        'app_id': os.getenv('PUSHER_APP_ID', '29382xx..'),
        'client': os.getenv('PUSHER_CLIENT', 'shS8dxx..'),
        'secret': os.getenv('PUSHER_SECRET', 'HDGdjss..'),
    },
    'ably': {
        'secret': os.getenv('ABLY_SECRET', 'api:key')
    }
}

Each driver may require it's own individual setting values so be sure to check the documentation for the driver you are using. For the ably and pusher drivers, these are the only values you will need.

Make sure that the key in the DRIVER setting has a corresponding key in the DRIVERS setting.

Usage

Since we have a ServiceProvider Service Provider which takes care of the container bindings for us, we can now it simply by passing Broadcast into our parameter list in our controller methods like so:

def show(self, Broadcast):
    print(Broadcast) # prints the driver class

We can change the driver on the fly as well:

def show(self, BroadcastManager):
    print(BroadcastManager.driver('ably')) # prints the ably driver class

All drivers have the same methods so don't worry about different drivers having different methods.

Channels

We can send data through our WebSocket by running:

def show(self, Broadcast):
    Broadcast.channel('channel_name', 'message')

That's it! we have just sent a message to anyone subscribed to the channel_name channel.

We can also send a dictionary:

def show(self, Broadcast):
    Broadcast.channel('channel_name', {'message': 'hello world'})

We can also send a message to multiple channels by passing a list:

def show(self, Broadcast):
    Broadcast.channel(['channel1', 'channel2'], {'message': 'hello world'})

This will broadcast the message out to both channels. We can pass as many channels into the list as we like.

Masonite also has an optional third parameter which is the event name:

def show(self, Broadcast):
    Broadcast.channel('channel_name', 'message', 'subscribed')

Which will pass the event on to whoever is receiving the WebSocket.