GridGain Quick Start Guide for PHP

This chapter explains system requirements for running GridGain and how to install GridGain, start a cluster, and run a simple Hello World example using a thin client for PHP.

Thin Client is a lightweight GridGain connection mode. It does not participate in cluster, never holds any data, or performs computations. All it does is establish a socket connection to an individual GridGain node and perform all operations through that node.

Since GridGain is built on top of Apache Ignite, GridGain reuses Ignite’s system properties, environment properties, startup scripts, etc. wherever possible.

Prerequisites

This section describes the platform requirements for machines running GridGain. GridGain system requirements scale depending on the size of the cluster.

JDK

Oracle JDK 8, 11, 17 (in GridGain 8.8.23 and later) or 21 (in GridGain 8.9.10 and later)

Starting with GridGain 8.9.17, some features require JDK 11 or later. Currently, the following features are not supported when running GridGain on Java 8:

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Linux (any flavor), Windows (10 and up). For Docker environment, we provide Linux docker containers.

ISA

x86-64, SPARC, PowerPC

Network

No restrictions (10G recommended)

and:

PHP	Version 7.2 or higher and Composer Dependency Manager. PHP Multibyte String extension. Depending on your PHP configuration, you may need to additionally install/configure it.

(Optional) Open Ports

Depending on your environment and what your plan is, you may want to open additional ports. GridGain uses the following ports:

47100-47200 — ports used by GridGain nodes to communicate. Specific ports used depend on node configuration.
47500-47600 — ports used by GridGain nodes to discover other nodes in the network. Specific ports used depend on node configuration.
10800 — the port used for thin clients, JDBC and ODBC connections.
8080 — the port used for REST API.
11211 — the port used by control script calls. This port should only be opened on nodes that need to send control script messages to other nodes.

Installing GridGain

GridGain is available in three editions: Community Edition (CE), Enterprise Edition (EE) and Ultimate Edition (UE). For this example, we’ll use the GridGain CE, which is distributed as binary, docker, and cloud images, and via RPM/DEB. This chapter explains how to install the GridGain CE binary distribution.

To get started with the GridGain CE binary distribution:

Download the GridGain binary as a zip archive.
Unzip the zip archive into the installation folder in your system.
Move the ignite-rest-http folder from {gridgain}/libs/optional to {gridgain}/libs to enable the Ignite REST library for the cluster. The library is used by GridGain Nebula for cluster management and monitoring needs.
(Optional) Enable required modules.
(Optional) Set the IGNITE_HOME environment variable or Windows PATH to point to the installation folder and make sure there is no trailing / (or \ for Windows) in the path.

Once that’s done, install GridGain PHP Thin Client as a Composer package using the command below:

composer require gridgain/gridgain-client

To use the client in your application, include the vendor/autoload.php file, generated by Composer, to your source code, eg.

require_once __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

You’re almost ready to run your first application.

Starting a GridGain Node

Before connecting to GridGain from the PHP thin client, you must start at least one GridGain cluster node.

You can start a GridGain node from the command line using the default configuration or by passing a custom configuration file. You can start as many nodes as you like and they will all automatically discover each other.

Navigate into the bin folder of GridGain installation directory from the command shell. Your command might look like this:

cd {gridgain}/bin/

cd {gridgain}\bin\

Start a node with a custom configuration file that is passed as a parameter to ignite.sh|bat like this:

./ignite.sh ../examples/config/example-ignite.xml

ignite.bat ..\examples\config\example-ignite.xml

You will see output similar to this:

[08:53:45] Ignite node started OK (id=7b30bc8e)
[08:53:45] Topology snapshot [ver=1, locNode=7b30bc8e, servers=1, clients=0, state=ACTIVE, CPUs=4, offheap=1.6GB, heap=2.0GB]

Open another tab from your command shell and run the same command again:

./ignite.sh ../examples/config/example-ignite.xml

ignite.bat ..\examples\config\example-ignite.xml

Check the Topology snapshot line in the output. Now you have a cluster of two server nodes with more CPUs and RAM available cluster-wide:

[08:54:34] Ignite node started OK (id=3a30b7a4)
[08:54:34] Topology snapshot [ver=2, locNode=3a30b7a4, servers=2, clients=0, state=ACTIVE, CPUs=4, offheap=3.2GB, heap=4.0GB]

Running Your First GridGain Application

Once at least one node is started, you can use the GridGain PHP Thin Client to perform cache operations. Archive installation of PHP Thin Client includes several ready-to-run PHP examples in the {client_dir}/examples directory. Here is example how to run one of them:

cd {client_dir}/examples
php CachePutGetExample.php

cd {client_dir}\examples
php CachePutGetExample.php

Assuming that the server node is running locally, and that you have completed all of the pre-requisites listed above, here is a very simple HelloWorld example that puts and gets values from the cache. Note the require_once line — make sure the path is correct. If you followed the instructions above, and if you place this hello world example in your examples folder, it should work.

<?php

require_once __DIR__ . '/../vendor/autoload.php';

use Apache\Ignite\Client;
use Apache\Ignite\ClientConfiguration;
use Apache\Ignite\Type\ObjectType;
use Apache\Ignite\Cache\CacheEntry;
use Apache\Ignite\Exception\ClientException;

function performCacheKeyValueOperations(): void
{
    $client = new Client();
    try {
        $client->connect(new ClientConfiguration('127.0.0.1:10800'));
        $cache = $client->getOrCreateCache('myCache')->
            setKeyType(ObjectType::INTEGER);

        // put and get value
        $cache->put(1, 'Hello World');
        $value = $cache->get(1);
        echo($value);
    } catch (ClientException $e) {
        echo($e->getMessage());
    } finally {
        $client->disconnect();
    }
}

performCacheKeyValueOperations();

Next Steps

From here, you may want to:

Read more about using GridGain
Explore the additional examples included with GridGain

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Last updated on May 02, 2025