Real time monitoring PHP applications with websockets and node.js

The inspection of the error logs is a common way to detect errors and bugs. We also can show errors on-screen within our developement server, or we even can use great tools like firePHP to show our PHP errors and warnings inside our firebug console. That’s cool, but we only can see our session errors/warnings. If we want to see another’s errors we need to inspect the error log. tail -f is our friend, but we need to surf against all the warnings of all sessions to see our desired ones. Because of that I want to build a tool to monitor my PHP applications in real-time. Let’s start:

What’s the idea? The idea is catch all PHP’s errors and warnings at run time and send them to a node.js HTTP server. This server will work similar than a chat server but our clients will only be able to read the server’s logs. Basically the applications have three parts: the node.js server, the web client (html5) and the server part (PHP). Let me explain a bit each part:

The node Server

Basically it has two parts: a http server to handle the PHP errors/warnings and a websocket server to manage the realtime communications with the browser. When I say that I’m using websockets that’s means the web client will only work with a browser with websocket support like chrome. Anyway it’s pretty straightforward swap from a websocket sever to a socket.io server to use it with every browser. But websockets seems to be the future, so I will use websockets in this example.

The http server:

http.createServer(function (req, res) {
    var remoteAdrress = req.socket.remoteAddress;
    if (allowedIP.indexOf(remoteAdrress) >= 0) {
        res.writeHead(200, {
            'Content-Type': 'text/plain'
        });
        res.end('Ok\n');
        try {
            var parsedUrl = url.parse(req.url, true);
            var type = parsedUrl.query.type;
            var logString = parsedUrl.query.logString;
            var ip = eval(parsedUrl.query.logString)[0];
            if (inspectingUrl == "" ||  inspectingUrl == ip) {
                clients.forEach(function(client) {
                    client.write(logString);
                });
            }
        } catch(err) {
            console.log("500 to " + remoteAdrress);
            res.writeHead(500, {
                'Content-Type': 'text/plain'
            });
            res.end('System Error\n');
        }
    } else {
        console.log("401 to " + remoteAdrress);
        res.writeHead(401, {
            'Content-Type': 'text/plain'
        });
        res.end('Not Authorized\n');
    }
}).listen(httpConf.port, httpConf.host);

and the web socket server:

var inspectingUrl = undefined;

ws.createServer(function(websocket) {
    websocket.on('connect', function(resource) {
        var parsedUrl = url.parse(resource, true);
        inspectingUrl = parsedUrl.query.ip;
        clients.push(websocket);
    });

    websocket.on('close', function() {
        var pos = clients.indexOf(websocket);
        if (pos >= 0) {
            clients.splice(pos, 1);
        }
    });

}).listen(wsConf.port, wsConf.host);

If you want to know more about node.js and see more examples, have a look to the great site: http://nodetuts.com/. In this site Pedro Teixeira will show examples and node.js tutorials. In fact my node.js http + websoket server is a mix of two tutorials from this site.

The web client.

The web client is a simple websockets application. We will handle the websockets connection, reconnect if it dies and a bit more. I’s based on node.js chat demo

<?php $ip = filter_input(INPUT_GET, 'ip', FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING); ?>

        Real time <?= $ip ?> monitor
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.3/jquery.min.js"></script><script type="text/javascript">// <![CDATA[
            selectedIp = '<?= $ip ?>';

// ]]></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="js.js"></script>
</pre>
<div id="toolbar">
<ul id="status">
	<li>Socket status: <span id="socketStatus">Conecting ...</span></li>
	<li>IP: <!--?= $ip == '' ? 'all' : $ip . " <a href="?ip="-->[all]" ?></li>
	<li>count: <span id="count">0</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<pre>

And the javascript magic

var timeout = 5000;
var wsServer = '192.168.2.2:8880';
var unread = 0;
var focus = false;

var count = 0;
function updateCount() {
    count++;
    $("#count").text(count);
}

function cleanString(string) {
    return string.replace(/&/g,"&").replace(/</g,"<").replace(/>/g,">");
}

function updateUptime () {
    var now = new Date();
    $("#uptime").text(now.toRelativeTime());
}

function updateTitle(){
    if (unread) {
        document.title = "(" + unread.toString() + ") Real time " + selectedIp + " monitor";
    } else {
        document.title = "Real time " + selectedIp + " monitor";
    }
}

function pad(n) {
    return ("0" + n).slice(-2);
}

function startWs(ip) {
    try {
        ws = new WebSocket("ws://" + wsServer + "?ip=" + ip);
        $('#toolbar').css('background', '#65A33F');
        $('#socketStatus').html('Connected to ' + wsServer);
        //console.log("startWs:" + ip);
        //listen for browser events so we know to update the document title
        $(window).bind("blur", function() {
            focus = false;
            updateTitle();
        });

        $(window).bind("focus", function() {
            focus = true;
            unread = 0;
            updateTitle();
        });
    } catch (err) {
        //console.log(err);
        setTimeout(startWs, timeout);
    }

    ws.onmessage = function(event) {
        unread++;
        updateTitle();
        var now = new Date();
        var hh = pad(now.getHours());
        var mm = pad(now.getMinutes());
        var ss = pad(now.getSeconds());

        var timeMark = '[' + hh + ':' + mm + ':' + ss + '] ';
        logString = eval(event.data);
        var host = logString[0];
        var line = "<table class='message'><tr><td width='1%' class='date'>" + timeMark + "</td><td width='1%' valign='top' class='host'><a href=?ip=" + host + ">" + host + "</a></td>";
        line += "<td class='msg-text' width='98%'>" + logString[1]; + "</td></tr>";
        if (logString[2]) {
            line += "<tr><td> </td><td colspan='3' class='msg-text'>" + logString[2] + "</td></tr>";
        }

        $('#log').append(line);
        updateCount();
        window.scrollBy(0, 100000000000000000);
    };

    ws.onclose = function(){
        //console.log("ws.onclose");
        $('#toolbar').css('background', '#933');
        $('#socketStatus').html('Disconected');
        setTimeout(function() {startWs(selectedIp)}, timeout);
    }
}

$(document).ready(function() {
    startWs(selectedIp);
});

The server part:

The server part will handle silently all PHP warnings and errors and it will send them to the node server. The idea is to place a minimal PHP line of code at the beginning of the application that we want to monitor. Imagine the following piece of PHP code

$a = $var[1];
$a = 1/0;
class Dummy
{
    static function err()
    {
        throw new Exception("error");
    }
}
Dummy1::err();

it will throw:
A notice: Undefined variable: var
A warning: Division by zero
An Uncaught exception ‘Exception’ with message ‘error’

So we will add our small library to catch those errors and send them to the node server

include('client/NodeLog.php');
NodeLog::init('192.168.2.2');

$a = $var[1];
$a = 1/0;
class Dummy
{
    static function err()
    {
        throw new Exception("error");
    }
}
Dummy1::err();

The script will work in the same way than the fist version but if we start our node.js server in a console:

$ node server.js
HTTP server started at 192.168.2.2::5672
Web Socket server started at 192.168.2.2::8880

We will see those errors/warnings in real-time when we start our browser

Here we can see a small screencast with the working application:

This is the server side library:

class NodeLog
{
    const NODE_DEF_HOST = '127.0.0.1';
    const NODE_DEF_PORT = 5672;

    private $_host;
    private $_port;

    /**
     * @param String $host
     * @param Integer $port
     * @return NodeLog
     */
    static function connect($host = null, $port = null)
    {
        return new self(is_null($host) ? self::$_defHost : $host, is_null($port) ? self::$_defPort : $port);
    }

    function __construct($host, $port)
    {
        $this->_host = $host;
        $this->_port = $port;
    }

    /**
     * @param String $log
     * @return Array array($status, $response)
     */
    public function log($log)
    {
        list($status, $response) = $this->send(json_encode($log));
        return array($status, $response);
    }

    private function send($log)
    {
        $url = "http://{$this->_host}:{$this->_port}?logString=" . urlencode($log);
        $ch = curl_init();
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

        $response = curl_exec($ch);
        $status   = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
        curl_close($ch);

        return array($status, $response);
    }

    static function getip() {
        $realip = '0.0.0.0';
        if ($_SERVER) {
            if ( isset($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR']) && $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'] ) {
                $realip = $_SERVER["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"];
            } elseif ( isset($_SERVER['HTTP_CLIENT_IP']) && $_SERVER["HTTP_CLIENT_IP"] ) {
                $realip = $_SERVER["HTTP_CLIENT_IP"];
            } else {
                $realip = $_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"];
            }
        } else {
            if ( getenv('HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR') ) {
                $realip = getenv('HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR');
            } elseif ( getenv('HTTP_CLIENT_IP') ) {
                $realip = getenv('HTTP_CLIENT_IP');
            } else {
                $realip = getenv('REMOTE_ADDR');
            }
        }
        return $realip;
    }

    public static function getErrorName($err)
    {
        $errors = array(
            E_ERROR             => 'ERROR',
            E_RECOVERABLE_ERROR => 'RECOVERABLE_ERROR',
            E_WARNING           => 'WARNING',
            E_PARSE             => 'PARSE',
            E_NOTICE            => 'NOTICE',
            E_STRICT            => 'STRICT',
            E_DEPRECATED        => 'DEPRECATED',
            E_CORE_ERROR        => 'CORE_ERROR',
            E_CORE_WARNING      => 'CORE_WARNING',
            E_COMPILE_ERROR     => 'COMPILE_ERROR',
            E_COMPILE_WARNING   => 'COMPILE_WARNING',
            E_USER_ERROR        => 'USER_ERROR',
            E_USER_WARNING      => 'USER_WARNING',
            E_USER_NOTICE       => 'USER_NOTICE',
            E_USER_DEPRECATED   => 'USER_DEPRECATED',
        );
        return $errors[$err];
    }

    private static function set_error_handler($nodeHost, $nodePort)
    {
        set_error_handler(function ($errno, $errstr, $errfile, $errline) use($nodeHost, $nodePort) {
            $err = NodeLog::getErrorName($errno);
            /*
            if (!(error_reporting() & $errno)) {
                // This error code is not included in error_reporting
                return;
            }
            */
            $log = array(
                NodeLog::getip(),
                "<strong class="{$err}">{$err}</strong> {$errfile}:{$errline}",
                nl2br($errstr)
            );
            NodeLog::connect($nodeHost, $nodePort)->log($log);
            return false;
        });
    }

    private static function register_exceptionHandler($nodeHost, $nodePort)
    {
        set_exception_handler(function($exception) use($nodeHost, $nodePort) {
            $exceptionName = get_class($exception);
            $message = $exception->getMessage();
            $file = $exception->getFile();
            $line = $exception->getLine();
            $trace = $exception->getTraceAsString();

            $msg = count($trace) > 0 ? "Stack trace:\n{$trace}" : null;
            $log = array(
                NodeLog::getip(),
                nl2br("<strong class="ERROR">Uncaught exception '{$exceptionName}'</strong> with message '{$message}' in {$file}:{$line}"),
                nl2br($msg)
            );
            NodeLog::connect($nodeHost, $nodePort)->log($log);
            return false;
        });
    }

    private static function register_shutdown_function($nodeHost, $nodePort)
    {
        register_shutdown_function(function() use($nodeHost, $nodePort) {
            $error = error_get_last();

            if ($error['type'] == E_ERROR) {
                $err = NodeLog::getErrorName($error['type']);
                $log = array(
                    NodeLog::getip(),
                    "<strong class="{$err}">{$err}</strong> {$error['file']}:{$error['line']}",
                    nl2br($error['message'])
                );
                NodeLog::connect($nodeHost, $nodePort)->log($log);
            }
            echo NodeLog::connect($nodeHost, $nodePort)->end();
        });
    }

    private static $_defHost = self::NODE_DEF_HOST;
    private static $_defPort = self::NODE_DEF_PORT;

    /**
     * @param String $host
     * @param Integer $port
     * @return NodeLog
     */
    public static function init($host = self::NODE_DEF_HOST, $port = self::NODE_DEF_PORT)
    {
        self::$_defHost = $host;
        self::$_defPort = $port;

        self::register_exceptionHandler($host, $port);
        self::set_error_handler($host, $port);
        self::register_shutdown_function($host, $port);

        $node = self::connect($host, $port);
        $node->start();
        return $node;
    }

    private static $time;
    private static $mem;

    public function start()
    {
        self::$time = microtime(TRUE);
        self::$mem = memory_get_usage();
        $log = array(NodeLog::getip(), "<strong class="OK">Start</strong> >>>> {$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']}");
        $this->log($log);
    }

    public function end()
    {
        $mem = (memory_get_usage() - self::$mem) / (1024 * 1024);
        $time = microtime(TRUE) - self::$time;
        $log = array(NodeLog::getip(), "<strong class="OK">End</strong> <<<< mem: {$mem} time {$time}");         $this->log($log);
    }
}

And of course the full code on gitHub: RealTimeMonitor