Temporal PHP SDK

Temporal is a distributed, scalable, durable, and highly available orchestration engine used to execute asynchronous long-running business logic in a scalable and resilient way.

Temporal PHP SDK is the framework for authoring Workflows and Activities using PHP language.

Table of contents:

• Get starting
  • Installation
  • Usage
• Testing
• Dev environment
  • Temporal CLI
  • Buggregator
• Resources
• License

Get starting

Installation

Install the SDK using Composer:

composer require temporal/sdk

The SDK includes two main components: Clients and Workers.
The Clients component is used to start, schedule, and manage Workflows; the Workers component is used to execute Workflows and Activities.

The Clients component requires the grpc extension, and the Workers component requires RoadRunner. It's recommended to use both components with the protobuf extension in production to improve performance.

	Client	Worker
RoadRunner	—	required
ext-grpc	required	—
ext-protobuf	recommended	recommended

To download RoadRunner, you can use the following command:

./vendor/bin/rr get

Usage

If you are using Spiral, follow the instructions in the documentation.

If you are using the SDK without integrations, the following sections of the documentation may be helpful:

• How to run Worker Processes
• How to develop a basic Workflow
• How to connect a Temporal Client to a Temporal Service
• How to start a Workflow Execution

Note

Check out the repository with examples of using the PHP SDK.

Warning

Since version 2.11.0, feature flags were introduced that change the behavior of the entire PHP worker.
It's recommended to disable deprecated behavior.

Testing

The PHP SDK includes a toolkit for testing Workflows. There is documentation and dev guide on how to test a Workflow using Activity mocking.

To ensure the determinism of a Workflow, you can also use the Replay API in tests.

Dev environment

Some recommendations for setting up a development environment:

Temporal CLI

The Temporal CLI provides direct access to a Temporal Service via the terminal. You can use it to start, stop, inspect and operate on Workflows and Activities, and perform administrative tasks such as Namespace, Schedule, and Task Queue management. The Temporal CLI also includes an embedded Temporal Service suitable for use in development and CI/CD. It includes the Temporal Server, SQLite persistence, and the Temporal Web UI.

Run the following command to start the Temporal Service in development mode:

temporal server start-dev --log-level error

Experimental features:

• Add flags --dynamic-config-value frontend.enableUpdateWorkflowExecution=true --dynamic-config-value frontend.enableUpdateWorkflowExecutionAsyncAccepted=true to enable the Workflow Update feature.
• Add flag --dynamic-config-value frontend.enableExecuteMultiOperation=true to enable updateWithStart() feature.
• Add flag --dynamic-config-value system.enableEagerWorkflowStart=true to enable the Eager Workflow Start feature.

Buggregator

During development, you might need to dump a variable, throw an error trace, or simply look at the call stack. Since Workflows and Activities run in RoadRunner workers, you cannot use var_dump, print_r, echo, and other functions that output data to STDOUT.

Instead, use Buggregator along with Trap. In this case, dumps, traces, and logs will be sent via socket to your local Buggregator server, where you can view them in a convenient web interface.

Tip

Trap is a wrapper around symfony/var-dumper, providing additional debugging capabilities. Moreover, Trap patches var-dumper for outputting protobuf structures, which is very handy when working with Temporal.

To run Buggregator in Docker, execute the command below and follow the instructions:

docker run --rm -p 8000:8000 -p 1025:1025 -p 9912:9912 -p 9913:9913 ghcr.io/buggregator/server:latest

If you are not using Docker or running PHP code outside a container, you can use Trap as a compact server:

./vendor/bin/trap --ui=8000

Now use the trap(), tr(), or dump() functions to output data to Buggregator. Web UI will be available at http://localhost:8000.

IDE Plugin

For advanced autocomplete while coding in PHPStorm, use Meta Storm plugin. The plugin provides better autocomplete and links Workflow and Activity when writing and debugging code.

Resources

Read the docs

Ask a question

Stay tuned

Additionally

License

Temporal PHP SDK is open-sourced software licensed under the MIT license.