Warble

Realtime for your Flarum forum, with no server to run. flarum-warble makes flarum/realtime work anywhere — live discussions, typing indicators, notifications — including shared hosting where a websocket server is impossible. Out of the box it uses polling: each visitor's browser asks your forum for updates every few seconds, so realtime needs nothing but the forum itself. If you can run a websocket server, point Warble at it and get instant delivery instead.

How it works

Warble is a thin companion to flarum/realtime — realtime does all the work (live posts, typing, notifications); Warble decides how the events travel:

• Polling (the default, zero infrastructure). Broadcasts are written to a short-lived table in your database; each browser collects them by cursor every few seconds. Hidden tabs stop polling, idle tabs slow down, and every wait is jittered so tabs never stampede. Typing stays private the right way: who-is-typing names are decided on your server per reader, so a member who hides their online status is anonymous to everyone not permitted to see through it.
• Websocket (bring your own, instant). Add a websocket block to your config.php pointing at any Pusher-protocol server you run — Laravel Reverb or soketi both work — and Warble steps aside apart from keeping typing names working (realtime 2.0.0-rc.6 only sends them through its own bundled server; Warble restores them for relays).

The transport is chosen automatically and can be forced either way on the Warble settings page.

Expect polling to be a few seconds behind rather than instant, and to add a small request per visitor per interval — fine for small and mid-size communities, which is exactly who can't run socket servers. A busy forum should graduate to a websocket.

Realtime's own feature settings stay yours: typing indicators, discussion-list typing dots, list update interval, notification toast duration, and the "view who is typing" permission. We encourage you to open the Realtime settings page and tune those to fit your forum — Warble never touches them.

Leave the key blank to disconnect. Outgrow the managed service? No lock-in: flarum/realtime ships its own websocket daemon (php flarum realtime:serve) — disconnect Warble and run the stock daemon on your own server any time.

Requirement: your forum's config.php must be writable by the web server (it is on a standard Flarum install). Warble writes the connection there because that's where flarum/realtime reads it — the change takes effect immediately, no restart. If config.php is locked down, Warble tells you in the settings page.

Troubleshooting: the settings page says "This extension has no configuration"

That page means your forum is serving an outdated compiled assets build, one made before Warble was enabled, so the key field literally isn't in the JavaScript your browser receives. This happens on some shared hosts when Flarum's post-enable cache flush fails; reinstalling, purging, or clearing your browser cache won't fix it, because the stale build lives on the server.

Warble now repairs this by itself: it checks the served build on admin page loads and rebuilds it when it predates Warble. If it can't (or another extension's script crashes the page before Warble loads), a red banner appears at the bottom of the admin panel explaining exactly what's wrong in plain language, with a one-click fix where possible. No SSH needed. If the banner says the assets folder isn't writable, that part is for your hosting provider.

Choosing a transport

• Polling — zero infrastructure, works on any hosting, a few seconds behind. The default when no websocket is configured.
• Your own websocket — instant. Any Pusher-protocol server works (Reverb, soketi); add its details under websocket in config.php.
• flarum/realtime's bundled daemon — also instant, no Warble involved: run php flarum realtime:serve where you can keep a process alive.

Forums connected to the retired hosted Warble service keep working unchanged: their written config.php connection is just a websocket configuration like any other.

Licensing

MIT, free, and standalone — nothing here depends on any external service.