Client events

Client events let one subscriber send a message directly to the others on a channel without a round-trip through your backend — ideal for ephemeral signals like "user is typing".

Rules

Surge enforces the same constraints as Pusher:

• The event name must start with client-.
• They are only allowed on private and presence channels (never public).
• The sender must be subscribed to the channel.
• They are not echoed back to the sender.

If client events are disabled (see below) or the rules aren't met, Surge drops the event — a client- event is never delivered to an unauthorized channel.

Sending

With Echo:

const channel = Echo.private('chat.1')

channel.whisper('typing', { user: 'Ann' })

channel.listenForWhisper('typing', (e) => {
  console.log(`${e.user} is typing…`)
})

Fan-out across nodes

When Redis scaling is enabled, client events are relayed to peer nodes too, so subscribers connected to a different node also receive them.

Disabling

Set client_events to false in config/surge.php (or SURGE_CLIENT_EVENTS=false) to reject all client- events. A rejected event returns a pusher:error to the sender.

Next: Broadcasting events from your backend.