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.
For details, go to the Centrifugo documentation site.
What's changed
Improvements
- Launching the official tutorial showing the process of building complex real-time application with Centrifugo in detail. It's called Grand Tutorial, and we have a special section on the site for it. In the tutorial we build a WebSocket chat (messenger) app with Django, React and Centrifugo. We cover various aspects of building a production-grade app with Centrifugo and going beyond basics usually shown in instant messaging app tutorials. The idea to keep it in a separate section on the site instead of a blog is to maintain the tutorial actual and extend as time goes.
- Introducing built-in asynchronous consumers. From PostgreSQL outbox table (to natively support transactional outbox) and from Kafka topics. Notably, the "Grand Tutorial" mentioned earlier demonstrates the practical use of both built-in consumers, including the Change Data Capture (CDC) approach for streaming data to Centrifugo using the Debezium connector for PostgreSQL with Kafka Connect.
- Centrifugo now offers the capability to specify an
idempotency_keywhen invokingpublishorbroadcastserver API methods. This is a key Centrifugo will use to prevent duplicate sending of the same publication to a channel. This allows making effective retries when publishing to Centrifugo. Centrifugo maintains a cache of results associated with the used idempotency keys during publishing for a duration of 5 minutes. This cache is utilized to prevent the redundant publication of a message and its addition to the message history if it already exists in the cache. See updated docs for publish and broadcast server APIs. - Refactor
MakeTLSConfigand support mTLS on server by @tie, see #739. This means mTLS is supported for all TLS configurations in Centrifugo – by using TLS optionstls_client_caortls_client_ca_pem. - Added possibility to set
parallelboolean flag in batch API – to make batch commands processing parallel on Centrifugo side, potentially reducing latency, especially when using the Redis engine, as there is no need to wait for N * RTT (Round Trip Time) for sequential command processing.
Misc
- Release is built using Go v1.21.5
- Improvements to the code base by introducing the use of the
Serviceinterface with aRun(ctx context.Context) errormethod. This approach is now recommended for the proper initiation and termination of various extension services within Centrifugo.