OPC UA in Pure PHP: Introducing the php-opcua Project

OPC UA (Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture) is the vendor-neutral protocol that PLCs, SCADA systems, sensors and historians use to expose data and methods. If you've ever needed production data in a web application, OPC UA is almost certainly where that data lives.

Until now, a PHP developer had three options, all bad: compile and maintain a C/C++ extension, stand up an HTTP gateway in another language and poll it, or simply switch language. Each option adds a moving part between your application and the machine — one more thing to deploy, secure and debug.

php-opcua removes the moving part. The whole protocol stack — binary encoding, secure channels, sessions — is implemented in PHP itself, based on the OPC UA specification. If your server runs PHP 8.2+, it can talk to the factory floor natively.

What ships today

The ecosystem is split into focused packages, so you only install what you use:

On top of the core, opcua-client-nodeset ships pre-generated typed classes for 51 OPC Foundation companion specifications — DI, Robotics, MachineTool, PackML, ISA-95 and more — so $robot->getAxes() is a real, autocompleted method call instead of a hand-built node lookup.

Read your first value in five minutes

You'll need a reachable OPC UA server. If you don't have a PLC on your desk, any public demo server or a local simulator works the same way.

1. 01

   Install the client

   One Composer package, no extensions to compile.

   composer require php-opcua/opcua-client
   

2. 02

   Connect to the server

   Point the builder at the endpoint URL. opc.tcp:// is OPC UA's binary transport — the fastest and most widely supported.

   use PhpOpcua\Client\ClientBuilder;
   
   $client = ClientBuilder::create()
       ->connect('opc.tcp://192.168.1.10:4840');
   

3. 03

   Read a node

   Every piece of data in an OPC UA server is a node, addressed by a NodeId — a namespace plus an identifier, like ns=2;s=Temperature.

   $temp = $client->read('ns=2;s=Temperature');
   // 23.7 — straight from the factory floor
   

The same read, in whichever flavour fits your stack:

use PhpOpcua\Client\ClientBuilder;
 
$client = ClientBuilder::create()
    ->connect('opc.tcp://192.168.1.10:4840');
 
$temp = $client->read('ns=2;s=Temperature');

use PhpOpcua\Laravel\Facades\OpcUa;
 
$temp = OpcUa::connection('plant-a')
    ->read('ns=2;s=Temperature');

opcua read --endpoint opc.tcp://192.168.1.10:4840 "ns=2;s=Temperature"

Tested against the reference implementation

A protocol stack is only as good as its interoperability. Every package in the ecosystem is integration-tested against UA-.NETStandard, the OPC Foundation's reference implementation — over 1,800 tests across the ecosystem, run via uanetstandard-test-suite against 10 pre-configured servers (plus a Security Key Service and a PubSub publisher) covering every security policy and every authentication mode we ship.

php-opcua is an independent open source project, based on the OPC UA specification. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the OPC Foundation.

What's next

The ecosystem already spans eleven packages — browse them all on the Discover page. The project is MIT-licensed and feedback is the most valuable contribution right now — especially from people running real industrial workloads. What gets built next is driven by what real plants need.

• Source and issues: github.com/php-opcua
• Packages: packagist.org/packages/php-opcua
• Package docs: php-opcua.com/documentation/opcua-client
• Quick start: Getting started guide

If you've ever wanted production data in a PHP application without a gateway in between — try it, and tell us what breaks.