RoadRunner PHP App Server

This is a repackaged open source software product wherein additional charges apply for cloudimg support services.

## RoadRunner - Production-Ready PHP Application Server AMI with 24/7 Expert Support

RoadRunner is a high-performance PHP application server and process manager written in Go. Instead of re-bootstrapping the PHP interpreter on every request, RoadRunner starts a pool of long-lived PHP worker processes once and keeps them warm, then dispatches incoming requests to them over an efficient pipes relay. The result is dramatically lower per-request overhead than a traditional PHP-FPM setup, with predictable memory use, graceful worker recycling and built-in supervision. RoadRunner speaks PSR-7 and PSR-15 to your PHP application, and its plugin architecture adds HTTP and HTTP/2 serving, gRPC, background jobs and queues, key-value caching and more from a single static binary.

## Why This AMI Over a Manual Install

• Instant time-to-value: RoadRunner is running as a systemd service the moment your instance boots, reverse proxied behind nginx - no package installation, no dependency troubleshooting and no proxy configuration required.
• Proven end to end: PHP 8.3 and Composer are already installed and a minimal demo PSR-7 worker application is vendored and running, rendering a status page that shows the PHP version, the RoadRunner version and the identity of the worker process serving each request. Replace the demo worker with your own PSR-7 application, or point RoadRunner at an existing framework project, and reload the server.
• Expert support included: 24/7 technical assistance from cloudimg engineers covering deployment, TLS termination, worker-pool tuning and troubleshooting.

## Application Stack

• RoadRunner installed as the official prebuilt single Go binary at /usr/local/bin/rr, SHA256-verified during install
• PHP 8.3 CLI plus the extensions the PSR-7 worker needs, and Composer, from the distribution archive
• A dedicated unprivileged service account owns the app directory; systemd starts RoadRunner on boot and restarts it automatically on failure
• nginx reverse proxy on port 80, ready for your TLS certificate

## Security Posture

• Loopback-only listeners: RoadRunner binds only to loopback for its HTTP, status and RPC listeners; the network reaches the application exclusively through the nginx reverse proxy
• No admin surface, no default password: RoadRunner has no web admin interface and the demo application is served content only, so no credential is baked into the image
• Unprivileged execution: RoadRunner and its PHP workers run under a dedicated service account with minimal OS permissions
• TLS readiness: the nginx virtual host is ready for your certificate; cloudimg support can assist with connector configuration and AWS Certificate Manager integration

## AWS Integration Points

• Application Load Balancer: place this AMI behind an ALB for traffic distribution, health checks and TLS termination at the load balancer tier
• Amazon CloudWatch: stream the nginx and RoadRunner logs to CloudWatch Logs for centralized monitoring and alerting
• AWS Systems Manager: use Session Manager for secure shell access without opening SSH ports, and Patch Manager for OS-level updates
• Amazon S3: store application artifacts in S3 and pull them during deployment pipelines
• AWS Certificate Manager: provision and manage TLS certificates for HTTPS at nginx or the ALB

## Features

A persistent, supervised PHP worker pool; PSR-7 and PSR-15 request handling; HTTP and HTTP/2 serving; gRPC; background jobs and queues; key-value plugins; graceful worker recycling and memory limits; and a health and metrics status endpoint on loopback for readiness checks.

## Use Cases

• High-throughput PHP APIs and web apps: serve REST APIs and web applications with far lower per-request overhead than PHP-FPM, behind an Application Load Balancer with auto-scaling for variable traffic
• Framework acceleration: run Symfony, Laravel or other PSR-7 framework projects on a warm worker pool for lower latency
• Lift and shift of PHP workloads: migrate existing PHP applications to EC2 on a modern, supervised application server without re-architecting

## About cloudimg

cloudimg publishes and maintains production-ready application server images across AWS Marketplace and Azure Marketplace, providing multi-cloud presence and consistent support for open-source infrastructure. Every image receives ongoing security patches and version updates backed by 24/7 engineering support.

This is a repackaged open source software product with additional charges for cloudimg support services. RoadRunner is distributed under the MIT license. All product and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. Use of them does not imply any affiliation with or endorsement by them.