Tubesock - !! This gem is no longer updated. We recommend you use Rails's built-in ActionCable !!

Tubesock lets you use websockets from rack and rails 4+ by using Rack's new hijack interface to access the underlying socket connection.

In contrast to other websocket libraries, Tubesock does not use a reactor (read: no eventmachine). Instead, it leverages Rails 4's new full-stack concurrency support. Note that this means you must use a concurrent server. We recommend Puma > 2.0.0.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'tubesock'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install tubesock

To use Tubesock with rack, you need to hijack the rack environment and then return an asynchronous response. For example:

require 'tubesock'

class Server
  def call(env)
    if env["HTTP_UPGRADE"] == 'websocket'
      tubesock = Tubesock.hijack(env)
      tubesock.onmessage do |message|
        puts "Got #{message}"
      end
      tubesock.listen
      [ -1, {}, [] ]
    else
      [404, {'Content-Type' => 'text/plain'}, ['Not Found']]
    end
  end
end

Then you could do the following in your config.ru file to use this class:

run Server.new

On Rails 4 there is a module you can use called Tubesock::Hijack. In a controller:

class ChatController < ApplicationController
  include Tubesock::Hijack

  def chat
    hijack do |tubesock|
      tubesock.onopen do
        tubesock.send_data "Hello, friend"
      end

      tubesock.onmessage do |data|
        tubesock.send_data "You said: #{data}"
      end
    end
  end
end

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request