Realtime

Realtime keeps the studio, conversations and notifications live without reloading. It uses Laravel broadcasting on the API and @arkstack/realtime in the app.

Drivers

Driver	What you need
none	Nothing. The app still works; people reload to see changes.
reverb	REVERB_* keys and a running php artisan reverb:start. Self-hosted and free.
pusher	A Pusher Channels app and its PUSHER_* keys.
ably	An Ably key in ABLY_KEY. Used through Ably's Pusher protocol.
firebase	A Firebase project with Realtime Database and the FIREBASE_* keys. realtime:prune deletes old events every hour.

REALTIME_DRIVER sets the starting driver. Admins with manage-configuration can switch it at /admin/realtime, which also shows which keys each driver is missing. Keys always come from .env; see API .env.

For Reverb in production, see Reverb behind Nginx.

Channels

All channels are private. Their rules are in App\Broadcasting\Channels.

Channel	Who can join	Used for
project-track.{id}	The project's owner and collaborators	Stem changes in the studio
conversation.{type}.{id}	People who can see the thing being discussed	New messages
user.{id}	That user	Notifications and new-message alerts

How events flow

• The API sends events with Realtime::send(), which never throws, so a realtime outage never breaks a request.
• Each browser tab sends an X-Realtime-Origin id with its requests. Events carry that origin, and tabs skip events they caused themselves.
• In the app, useRealtimeChannel in src/utils/realtime.ts subscribes to a channel. SDKs are passed in through importModule, because Vite cannot resolve the package's dynamic imports.

Try it locally

REALTIME_DRIVER=reverb
REVERB_APP_ID=local
REVERB_APP_KEY=local-key
REVERB_APP_SECRET=local-secret
REVERB_HOST=localhost
REVERB_PORT=8080
REVERB_SCHEME=http

php artisan reverb:start --port=8080

Open the same project track as two users in two browsers. Changes made by one appear for the other.