Centrifugo is an open-source scalable real-time messaging server. Centrifugo can instantly deliver messages to application online users connected over supported transports (WebSocket, HTTP-streaming, SSE/EventSource, GRPC, SockJS, WebTransport). Centrifugo has the concept of a channel – so it's a user-facing PUB/SUB server.
Centrifugo is language-agnostic and can be used to build chat apps, live comments, multiplayer games, real-time data visualizations, collaborative tools, etc. in combination with any backend. It is well suited for modern architectures and allows decoupling the business logic from the real-time transport layer.
Several official client SDKs for browser and mobile development wrap the bidirectional protocol. In addition, Centrifugo supports a unidirectional approach for simple use cases with no SDK dependency.
- Centrifugo official documentation site
- Installation instructions
- Getting started tutorial
- Design overview and idiomatic usage
- FAQ
The core idea of Centrifugo is quite simple – it's a PUB/SUB server on top of modern real-time transports:
The hard part is to make this concept production-ready, efficient and available from different application environments. Centrifugo is a mature solution that already helped many projects with adding real-time features. It provides unique properties not available in other OSS solutions in the area:
- Built-in scalability to many machines with Redis, KeyDB, Nats, Tarantool
- Simple HTTP and GRPC server API to communicate from the backend
- Flexible connection authentication mechanisms: JWT and proxy-like
- Different types of Subscriptions: client-side and server-side
- Hot message history in channels, with automatic message recovery upon reconnect
- Online channel presence information, with join/leave notifications
- A way to send RPC calls to the backend over the real-time connection
- Strict and effective client protocol wrapped by several official SDKs
- Variety of supported real-time transports, both JSON and binary Protobuf message transfer
- Beautiful embedded admin web UI
- And much more, visit Centrifugo doc site
This repository is hosted by packagecloud.io.
Also thanks to JetBrains for supporting OSS (most of the code here written in Goland):