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Resonate Delivery

At-least-once message delivery for Resonate channels. Every broadcast is logged to a per-channel Redis Stream; a reconnecting client sends the id of the last message it saw, and the plugin replays everything since before live delivery resumes.

Solves the single most common WebSocket complaint: "I dropped for 20 seconds and missed messages."

What you get

• A Laravel broadcaster (resonate-delivery driver) that wraps Reverb, logs every broadcast, and tags the payload with a monotonic _replay_id.
• A Resonate server plugin that, when a subscribe carries last_event_id, replays the missed messages on that channel after subscription_succeeded and before any live broadcast.
• Bounded retention on both axes: MAXLEN ~ N caps how long each stream gets, a refreshed TTL caps how long an idle stream key survives.

What this is (and isn't)

• At-least-once within retention. With the default cap of 1000 messages per channel, a client that drops for 5 minutes on a low-traffic channel reconnects seamlessly. A client offline for hours on a high-traffic channel sees a clean break; design retention based on expected disconnect duration and your publish rate.
• Ordered. Everything replayed reaches the client before any live broadcast on that channel, and each side is in publish order. See Ordering.
• Duplicates can happen at the seam. A message published exactly as a reconnecting client is subscribing may arrive both in the replay and as a live broadcast. The live copy always arrives second, so it never reorders anything; the client deduplicates on the monotonic _replay_id.
• Best-effort logging, never an availability risk. If the delivery Redis is unreachable, the broadcast still goes out live; it is simply not logged and carries no _replay_id. A durability add-on must not be able to take down the broadcasting it was added to.
• Bounded replays. One replay buffers at most replay_max_messages (default 10000) messages for a connection; beyond that it is truncated and logged. The stream's own MAXLEN normally bites first.
• No ACK protocol. This is not a message queue. A subscriber that goes away forever does not hold a slot in any per-subscriber outbox. Per-subscriber state lives only on the connection.
• Server broadcasts only. client-* whispers between clients are not logged; they reach connected subscribers only.

Installation

Publish the config to set retention defaults or override the underlying broadcaster:

Configuring the broadcaster

Add the wrapping driver to config/broadcasting.php and point your default at it:

The wrapper delegates auth and the actual WebSocket send to the underlying connection (so your existing Reverb setup is unchanged); it adds the log write and the _replay_id augmentation around it.

Registering the server plugin

In config/reverb.php, list the plugin alongside any others you have running:

Restart Resonate (resonate:reload for a zero-downtime swap).

Client protocol

A client that wants replay sends last_event_id in the subscribe payload:

On every message it receives, the client reads data._replay_id and remembers the highest. On reconnect, it sends that value. First-time subscribers omit the field and get no replay (normal Pusher behaviour).

For Laravel Echo and the JS Pusher client there is no built-in plug for this; consumers must subscribe with the custom data field, which both libraries support via their lower-level subscription APIs.

Ordering

The guarantee is that a reconnecting client sees every replayed message before any live broadcast on that channel, with no interleaving.

That is a stronger claim than it looks, because the replay reads Redis and the connection is a live socket the whole time. The plugin gets it by reading before the connection joins the channel, not after:

1. The pusher:subscribe interceptor reads the whole missed window into memory. The connection has not joined the channel yet, so a broadcast walking the channel's connection list cannot reach it; the reads can take as many round trips as they need.
2. Resonate then joins the connection, sends subscription_succeeded, and calls the plugin's onSubscribe, all as straight-line synchronous code. The plugin writes the buffered frames there and performs no I/O, so no other fiber can run in that window and wedge a live message into the middle of the replay.

A message published after the final read is broadcast by a fiber that cannot run until the flush is finished, so it arrives live, after the replay, in order. Nothing is dropped at that seam.

Two consequences worth knowing:

• A subscribe carrying last_event_id completes slightly later than a plain one, by roughly the time it takes to read the missed window. Only that connection waits; the event loop is never blocked.
• A connection that is already subscribed to the channel gets no replay, because it has missed nothing and replaying would push messages it has already seen behind ones it has not.

Retention has two axes

MAXLEN ~ N bounds how long a single stream gets. It says nothing about how many streams exist, and a per-entity channel scheme (private-orders.{id}) mints a stream key per entity: broadcast to 100,000 orders and 100,000 keys stay in Redis forever, each holding up to N messages.

So every append also stamps retention.ttl on the key (default 7 days). Because it is refreshed on each append, an actively used channel never expires, while one that goes quiet is reclaimed a window later. Set ttl to 0 to keep every stream forever.

Pick a window longer than the longest disconnect you intend to support. A client returning after the TTL has elapsed finds an empty stream and gets no replay, exactly as if it had fallen out of the MAXLEN window.

Configuration reference

Requirements

• PHP 8.5+
• Laravel 13
• Resonate 0.4+
• Redis 5+ (Redis Streams; included in any modern Redis)

Testing

Tests that touch Redis expect a server on 127.0.0.1:6379 and use database 15; they skip cleanly when no Redis is reachable.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.