Using AnyCable with Hotwire

AnyCable be used as a Turbo Streams backend for any application, not only Ruby or Rails.

Rails applications

Since turbo-rails uses Action Cable under the hood, no additional configuration is required to use AnyCable with Hotwired Rails applications. See the getting started guide for instructions.

We recommend using AnyCable in a standalone mode (i.e., without running an RPC server) for applications only using Action Cable for Turbo Streams. For that, you must accomplish the following steps:

• Generate AnyCable application secret for your application and store it in the credentials (anycable.secret) or the environment variable (ANYCABLE_SECRET).

• Enable JWT authentication by using the action_cable_with_jwt_meta_tag(**identifiers) helper instead of the action_cable_meta_tag (see docs).

• Configure Turbo to use your AnyCable application secret for signing streams:

  # config/environments/production.rb
  config.turbo.signed_stream_verifier_key = "<your-secret>"Copy to clipboardErrorCopied

• Enable Turbo Streams support for AnyCable server:

  ANYCABLE_SECRET=your-secret \
  ANYCABLE_TURBO_STREAMS=true \
  anycable-go
  
  # or via cli args
  anycable-go --secret=your-secret --turbo_streamsCopy to clipboardErrorCopied

That's it! Now you Turbo Stream connections are served solely by AnyCable server.

Other frameworks and languages

Hotwire is not limited to Ruby on Rails. You can use Turbo with any backend. Live updates via Turbo Streams, however, require a connection to receive the updates. This is where AnyCable comes into play.

You can use AnyCable as a real-time server for Turbo Streams as follows:

• Use JWT authentication to authenticate connections (or run your AnyCable server with authentication disabled via the --noauth option)

• Enable Turbo signed streams support.

• Configure your backend to broadcast Turbo Streams updates via AnyCable (see broadcasting documentation).

With this setup, you can use @hotwired/turbo-rails or @anycable/turbo-stream JavaScript libraries in your application without any modification.

Turbo Streams over Server-Sent Events

AnyCable supports Server-Sent Events (SSE) as a transport protocol. This means that you can use Turbo Streams with AnyCable without WebSockets and Action Cable (or AnyCable) client libraries—just with the help of the browser native EventSource API.

To create a Turbo Stream subscription over SSE, you must provide an URL to AnyCable SSE endpoint with the signed stream name as a query parameter when adding a <turbo-stream-source> element on the page:

<turbo-stream-source src="https://cable.example.com/events?turbo_signed_stream_name=<signed-name>" />Copy to clipboardErrorCopied

That's it! Now you can broadcast Turbo Stream updates from your backend. Moreover, AnyCable supports the Last-Event-ID feature of EventSource, which means your connection is reliable and you won't miss any updates even if network is unstable. Don't forget to enable the reliable streams feature.