Drupal on the Edge with Web Assembly

Run Drupal on the edge in your browser with Web Assembly.

This utilizes php-wasm and php-cgi-wasm by Sean Morris.

Want to learn more? Catch my session Running Drupal on the Edge with Web Assembly at DrupalCon Barcelona.

How it works

PHP has been compiled into Web Assembly.

• The php-wasm package allows us to execute PHP code in the browser.
• The php-cgi-wasm package allows us to execute PHP code in a service worker, which emulates CGI (think PHP-FPM), and allows serving requests to and from Drupal.

Running locally

Docker with DDEV

Using DDEV you can build and run the playground locally.

ddev start
ddev make build

Visit https://wasm-drupal.ddev.site

Without Docker

Currently this requires NPM, PHP (with Composer) on the host machine and Docker.

make build

make serve

Open http://localhost

Click Install for either Drupal or the Starshot prototype, and then wait for environment to launch.

Log in with

• Username: admin
• Password: admin

Upcoming: drupal-was package

The goal is to split out the JavaScript from this project into a reusable package for others.

• setup-cgi-worker.mjs as an easy way to register the service worker for serving a Drupal application
• install-worker.mjs as an easy way to install a Drupal application from an artifact

Debugging steps

Clearing all data

Use your browser's "Clear site data" functionality to perform a manual reset.

Debugging the service worker

Visit chrome://serviceworker-internals/

Limitations

• php-wasm does not provide an exposed function for running a specific script file, that means scripts like Composer and Drush cannot be directly invoked.
• php-wasm's SAPI name is embed, which breaks any code which checks PHP_SAPI === 'cli', such as Drush.

Next steps

• Allow exporting Drupal database to use locally, with DDEV. #10
• Allow exporting Drupal codebase to use locally, with DDEV. #11