README

Effortless real-time communication for Laravel apps using NATS.io via basis-company/nats.php

🧩 Overview

Laravel NATS is a wrapper package that allows Laravel developers to interact easily with the NATS messaging system.

NATS (Neural Autonomic Transport System) is a high-performance, lightweight messaging system for microservices, IoT, and distributed systems.

With this package, you can:

📤 Publish messages to NATS subjects
📩 Subscribe to messages
🔁 Request/Reply pattern using callbacks
⚙️ Integrate seamlessly within controllers, commands, or queued jobs
🧠 Use Laravel Facades, Service Container bindings, and Configuration
🧪 Test easily using PestPHP

⚙️ Installation

composer require peal-ihertz/laravel-nats dev-main

🧰 Configuration

Publish the config file (optional):

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=config

This will create:

// config/nats.php

return [
    'host' => env('NATS_HOST', '127.0.0.1'),
    'port' => env('NATS_PORT', 4222),
];

You can connect your Dockerized NATS instance or remote cluster:

NATS_HOST=nats
NATS_PORT=4222

🧱 Usage

🔹 Publish a Message

use Nats;

Nats::publish('notifications.new', ['message' => 'New user registered']);

or manually with a payload:

use Basis\Nats\Message\Payload;

$payload = new Payload(json_encode(['id' => 123]));
Nats::publish('orders.created', $payload);

🔹 Subscribe to a Subject

use Nats;

Nats::subscribe('notifications.new', function ($msg) {
    $data = json_decode($msg->body, true);
    logger('New notification received:', $data);
});

🔹 Request/Reply (Callback Pattern)

NATS supports RPC-style communication through a request-reply mechanism.

Client Side:

Nats::request('math.add', ['a' => 5, 'b' => 3], function ($response) {
    $data = json_decode($response->body, true);
    logger('Response from server:', $data);
});

Server Side (Subscriber):

Nats::subscribe('math.add', function ($msg) {
    $data = json_decode($msg->body, true);
    $sum = $data['a'] + $data['b'];

    $msg->reply(json_encode(['sum' => $sum]));
});

✅ The callback executes once the reply arrives — making it ideal for interactive real-time systems.

🔹 Example Controller

use App\Http\Controllers\Controller;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use Nats;

class NatsController extends Controller
{
    public function send()
    {
        Nats::publish('notifications.new', ['event' => 'UserRegistered']);
        return response()->json(['message' => 'Notification sent!']);
    }

    public function request()
    {
        Nats::request('math.add', ['a' => 10, 'b' => 7], function ($response) {
            logger('Received reply:', [json_decode($response->body, true)]);
        });

        return response()->json(['status' => 'request sent']);
    }
}

🧠 Advanced Features

1. JetStream Support (Optional)

If you use NATS JetStream, you can extend this package to handle durable streams and message persistence.
The underlying client supports JetStream commands and metadata.

2. Durable Subscriptions

Persistent subscriptions let you replay missed messages and process them at-least-once.

3. Async Handling

NATS supports fully asynchronous publish/subscribe and request/reply patterns.

4. Clustered & Secure

You can connect to multiple NATS servers, use TLS, and authentication via NATS tokens.

🧪 Testing

Running Tests

This package uses PestPHP.

Run all tests:

./vendor/bin/pest

Feature tests example (tests/Feature/NatsPublishTest.php):

it('can publish messages to nats', function () {
    $client = Mockery::mock(\Basis\Nats\Client::class);
    $client->shouldReceive('publish')->once();
    app()->instance(\Basis\Nats\Client::class, $client);

    Nats::publish('test.subject', ['foo' => 'bar']);
});

🐳 Example Docker Compose (for NATS testing)

version: "3"
services:
  nats:
    image: nats:latest
    ports:
      - "4222:4222"
      - "8222:8222"

Run:

docker-compose up -d

💡 Why Use NATS with Laravel?

Feature	Description
⚡ Speed	Handles millions of messages per second
🧩 Simplicity	Easy subject-based routing
🔁 Request/Reply	Built-in microservice communication
☁️ Scalable	Cluster and stream messages easily
🧠 Lightweight	Zero dependencies for core message broker
🔐 Secure	TLS and user authentication supported

peal-ihertz / laravel-nats

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