What is collaborate?

janalis/collaborate is a Symfony bundle for admin pages that several people use at the same time. It adds three things:

• Shared drafts. People editing the same record share one durable draft. Text and rich text, choices, checkboxes and collections stay in sync as they type. Save goes through the form's normal validation and persistence; a record saved elsewhere meanwhile opens a review of the differences, and Discard resets the draft for everyone. See Shared drafts.
• Presence and cursors. The header shows who else is on the page. Their pointers, carets, selections and the field each one is in are drawn in their color. See Cursors and presence.
• Saved-view refresh. Lists and detail pages reload when a save elsewhere changes what they show. See Saved-view refresh.

The bundle is a framework-level core (forms, Twig, controllers, the journal) plus an EasyAdmin adapter, loaded when EasyAdminBundle is registered. Without EasyAdmin, one small service tells the bundle which record a page edits (Without EasyAdmin).

How it works

• One Mercure stream per page. A page holds a single subscription that carries its cursor room, the drafts of its forms and the saved-view notices. Each payload names its channel, since Mercure does not tell a subscriber which topic an event came from, and a browser keeps only six HTTP/1.1 connections per origin.
• Signed grants. The layout renders a page grant (who the user is, which page, until when) and each shared form a field grant (which record, which fields, until when), both signed with the kernel secret and bound to a hash of what admits the user. The session endpoint mints a short-lived subscriber JWT for exactly the topics those grants prove.
• A journal in your database. Draft content never travels through the hub. Every change is stored in three tables and read back over authenticated, CSRF-protected requests; Mercure only says "something changed". Writers of one draft serialize on a MariaDB/MySQL named lock, so a hub outage loses nothing that was committed.
• Operational transformation on the clients. The server orders and bounds batches of CKEditor model operations; CKEditor's own transformations merge concurrent edits in every browser. Plain text fields use the same model, one paragraph long.
• No Node service. Everything server-side is PHP: the controllers, the journal and the purge command. The browser side is a set of native ES modules served by AssetMapper.

Requirements

Component	Version
PHP	8.4 or later
Symfony	7.4 or 8 (FrameworkBundle, SecurityBundle, TwigBundle, Form, CSRF protection, sessions)
Doctrine	ORM 3, DBAL 4, DoctrineBundle 2.13 or 3
Database	MariaDB or MySQL 8: the journal uses GET_LOCK, INSERT IGNORE, ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE and SELECT … FOR UPDATE
Mercure	symfony/mercure-bundle and a hub whose subscriber tokens the bundle signs with the hub's own token factory
Front end	Symfony AssetMapper; ckeditor5, @microsoft/fetch-event-source and bootstrap/js/src/modal.js in the import map; Bootstrap 5's Sass sources for the styles
Optional	easycorp/easyadmin-bundle 4.24+ or 5 (the adapter), gedmo/doctrine-extensions 3.13+ (per-locale draft fields for translatable properties)

The continuous integration runs PHP 8.4 and 8.5 with Symfony 7.4 and 8.1, against MariaDB 10.11 and 11.4.

Glossary

Term	Meaning
Layer	The hidden <div data-collaborate-layer> rendered by collaborate_layer(): it carries the page grant, the CSRF token and the client settings.
Page grant	A signed token naming the user and the page's cursor room. Every hub request carries it.
Field grant	A signed token naming a form's draft, its fields and their schema. Every draft request carries it, or its signature once the server knows it.
Draft	The shared state of one record (or of one new-record page): its fields, revisions and journal.
Journal	The ordered batches of changes of a draft, in collaborate_draft_event.
Generation	A draft's epoch. Compaction moves it on; pages still on the old one reload or stop.
Collaborator	A signed-in user that the identity provider gives an id and that holds the configured role.