Anycable Rails

AnyCable allows you to use any WebSocket server (written in any language) as a replacement for built-in Rails ActionCable server.

With AnyCable you can use channels, client-side JS, broadcasting - (almost) all that you can do with ActionCable.

You can even use ActionCable in development and not be afraid of compatibility issues.

Example Application

For usage outside Rails see AnyCable repository.

Requirements

Ruby ~> 2.3;
Rails ~> 5.0;
Redis

How It Works?

Compatible WebSocket servers

Installation

Add Anycable to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'anycable-rails'

# or if you want to use built-in Action Cable server
# for test and development (which is possible and recommended)
gem 'anycable-rails', group: :production

And then run:

rails generate anycable

to create executable.

Configuration

Add config/anycable.ymlif you want to override defaults (see below):

production:
  # gRPC server host
  rpc_host: "localhost:50051"
  # Redis URL (for broadcasting) 
  redis_url: "redis://localhost:6379/2"
  # Redis channel name
  redis_channel: "anycable"

Anycable uses anyway_config, thus it is also possible to set configuration variables through secrets.yml or environment vars.

Usage

Run Anycable RPC server:

./bin/anycable

and also run AnyCable-compatible WebSocket server, e.g. anycable-go:

anycable-go -addr='localhost:3334'

Don't forget to set cable url in your config/environments/production.rb:

config.action_cable.url = "ws://localhost:3334/cable"

ActionCable Compatibility

This is the compatibility list for the AnyCable gem, not for AnyCable servers (which may not support some of the features yet).

Feature	Status
Connection Identifiers	+
Connection Request (cookies, params)	+
Disconnect Handling	+
Subscribe to channels	+
Parameterized subscriptions	+
Unsubscribe from channels	+
Subscription Instance Variables	-
Performing Channel Actions	+
Streaming	+
Custom stream callbacks	-
Broadcasting	+
Periodical Timers	-
Disconnect remote clients	-

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/anycable/anycable-rails.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.