hoaproject/zombie

The Hoa\Zombie library.

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Hoa is a modular, extensible and structured set of PHP libraries.
Moreover, Hoa aims at being a bridge between industrial and research worlds.

Hoa\Zombie

This library allows to transform a process into a zombie: not alive, nor dead!

This is possible only if the program is running behind PHP-FPM (which manages processes for us).

Learn more.

Installation

With Composer, to include this library into your dependencies, you need to require hoa/zombie:

$ composer require hoa/zombie '~3.0'

For more installation procedures, please read the Source page.

Testing

Before running the test suites, the development dependencies must be installed:

$ composer install

Then, to run all the test suites:

$ vendor/bin/hoa test:run

For more information, please read the contributor guide.

Quick usage

To create a zombie, all we have to do is to call the Hoa\Zombie\Zombie::fork method. To kill a zombie, we have the choice between different weapons:

• Hoa\Zombie\Zombie::decapitate, ziip;
• Hoa\Zombie\Zombie::bludgeon, tap tap;
• Hoa\Zombie\Zombie::burn, if you are cold;
• Hoa\Zombie\Zombie::explode, boom;
• Hoa\Zombie\Zombie::cutOff, sausage?

All these methods have been proven. Thus:

// I'm alive!
Hoa\Zombie\Zombie::fork();
// I'm a zombie!
Hoa\Zombie\Zombie::decapitate();
// I'm dead…

But we have to run the script behind FastCGI, that is why we will use the Hoa\Fastcgi library in the following example.

In the Zombie.php file, we write the following instructions:

echo 'I guess I am sick…', "\n";
Hoa\Zombie\Zombie::fork();

// Do whatever you want here, e.g.:
sleep(10);
file_put_contents(
    __DIR__ . DS . 'AMessage',
    'Hello from after-life… or somewhere about!'
);
Hoa\Zombie\Zombie::decapitate();

Then, in the Run.php file, we write:

$fastcgi = new Hoa\Fastcgi\Responder(
    new Hoa\Socket\Client('tcp://127.0.0.1:9000')
);
echo $fastcgi->send([
    'GATEWAY_INTERFACE' => 'FastCGI/1.0',
    'REQUEST_METHOD'    => 'GET',
    'SCRIPT_FILENAME'   => __DIR__ . DS . 'Zombie.php'
]);

And finally, we can test:

$ php-fpm -d listen=127.0.0.1:9000
$ php Run.php
I guess I am sick…

And 10 seconds after, we will see the AMessage file appear with the content: Hello from after-life… or somewhere about!.

Documentation

The hack book of Hoa\Zombie contains detailed information about how to use this library and how it works.

To generate the documentation locally, execute the following commands:

$ composer require --dev hoa/devtools
$ vendor/bin/hoa devtools:documentation --open

More documentation can be found on the project's website: hoa-project.net.

Getting help

There are mainly two ways to get help:

• On the #hoaproject IRC channel,
• On the forum at users.hoa-project.net.

Contribution

Do you want to contribute? Thanks! A detailed contributor guide explains everything you need to know.

License

Hoa is under the New BSD License (BSD-3-Clause). Please, see LICENSE for details.

zombie's Issues

How to test this library?

Is there any way in atoum to run a FPM server, request the execution of some files and test this library? Also, we can just mock the lower used functions but it does not ensure something useful.

/cc @stephpy, @jubianchi and all the others @hoaproject/hoackers :-).

Support HHVM

See a replacement of fastcgi_finish_request here: facebook/hhvm#1230. It can impact the existing API.

Freeze php processes ?

Can this package be used to freeze PHP processes at some particular point? I'm interested because that might be great for testing concurrency/deadlock issues.