PhoenixNectar - Swift 6 client for Phoenix Channels

Your Libraries & OS Mentoring Libraries
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PhoenixNectar is a Swift client for Phoenix Channels, built from the ground up for Swift 6 strict concurrency.

It builds on the great work of SwiftPhoenixClient by David Stump and Daniel Rees, which has been the go-to Swift client for years. PhoenixNectar takes a different approach by embracing Swift’s modern concurrency model (actors, async/await, and AsyncStream) rather than the JS-style callback API.

What it looks like

import PhoenixNectar

struct ChatMessage: Codable, Sendable {
   let body: String
}

let client = try Socket(endpoint: "wss://api.example.com/socket")
try await client.connect()

let channel = try await client.joinChannel("room:lobby")

// Subscribe with AsyncStream
let posted = Event<ChatMessage>("message:posted")

for try await message in await channel.subscribe(to: posted) {
   print(message.body)
}

// Typed push with reply
let send = Push<ChatMessage, ChatMessage>("message:send")
let reply = try await channel.push(send, payload: ChatMessage(body: "hello"))
print(reply.body)

Features

  • Swift 6 strict concurrency — actor-owned runtime, no @unchecked Sendable workarounds
  • Push<Request, Response> and Event<T> for compile-time payload type safety
  • Auto reconnect, heartbeat, and channel rejoin
  • Auth token providers that re-evaluate on each reconnect
  • Connection state observation via AsyncStream
  • Binary channel support
  • iOS 16+, macOS 15+, tvOS 18+, watchOS 11+

Feedback welcome, especially from anyone running Phoenix Channels with iOS/macOS clients.

A demo project (demo iOS project with chat and image upload) and E2E tests are provided as well.

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This is awesome to see! I’m quite interested as I make heavy use of Phoenix Channels in iOS apps, and have been thinking of working up something like this.

SwiftPhoenixClient has been great, I’m grateful for it and have made a few contributions. But it would need a ton of work to adopt strict concurrency and I agree that starting from scratch is the better move.

I’ll try dropping this into a project and send some detailed feedback soon.

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