Event Sourcing in PHP
Event-sourced aggregates with #[EventSourcingAggregate]. Projections via #[ProjectionV2] — global, partitioned, or streaming. Gap detection on by default. Projection emission with rebuild auto-suppression. End-to-end PII encryption across event store, broker, and structured logs.
Composer package · Laravel or Symfony · PostgreSQL or MySQL · RabbitMQ, Kafka, SQS, Redis, or DBAL outbox
Capabilities relevant to event sourcing
Event Sourcing & Projections
Store events, not state. Aggregates, projections, replay, snapshotting. Partitioned + streaming projections so rebuilds parallelize across workers and catch up in real time — no single-process bottleneck.
Projections That Emit Events
A projection can emit a downstream event the moment it applies a change — sagas, event handlers, and other projections subscribe via the normal #[EventHandler]. Rebuild a projection? Emission is automatically suppressed, so downstream consumers aren't flooded with duplicate historical events while the read model catches up.
Blue-Green Projection Rebuild
Rebuild a projection on a new version in parallel — concurrent async backfill partitioned by aggregate ID scales rebuilds to millions of events across N workers. The live projection keeps serving queries until the atomic flip.
Self-Healing Projections
Projections are trigger-based: on every run they read from the Event Store at their last committed position. Crash at event #42? Fix the bug, deploy, and the projection catches up automatically — no manual reset, no backfill script.
End-to-end PII Protection
One #[Sensitive] attribute encrypts a field in the event store, on the wire over RabbitMQ / SQS / Redis / Kafka / DBAL outbox, and in your structured logs — because all serialization flows through one shared conversion pipeline.
PHP alternatives for this category
Each row names what you'd need to add to match Ecotone, and the architectural ceiling that integration cannot fix.
Spatie laravel-event-sourcing
Eloquent-bound. No gap detection. No projection emission. Single-process replay.
- Aggregates must extend `Spatie\EventSourcing\AggregateRoots\AggregateRoot`; events must implement the marker interface `ShouldBeStored`; projectors extend `Projector`; read models extend the Eloquent-backed `Projection` model.
- No gap detection on the `stored_events` table — concurrent-transaction commits can be silently skipped.
- No `EventStreamEmitter` equivalent for projections to emit downstream events transactionally.
- No crypto-shredding / PII encryption.
- Rebuilds run as a single-process `php artisan event-sourcing:replay` — no parallel-worker, no partitioned rebuild for millions of events.
EventSauce
An event-sourcing library only. Manual glue for everything downstream.
- An event-sourcing library only — no messaging, no async dispatch, no orchestration ships.
- Every downstream concern (event dispatch, async communication, multi-step coordination, cross-service distribution, shared retry/DLQ/PII middleware) becomes manual glue you assemble from separate libraries.
- Aggregates use the `AggregateRootBehaviour` trait; storage via `MessageRepository` (`DoctrineMessageRepository` or `IlluminateMessageRepository`); event consumers implement `MessageConsumer` through a `MessageDispatcher` chain you wire yourself.
- `MessageRepository::retrieveAll` paginates by aggregate, not by a gap-aware global position — concurrent-commit events can be silently skipped.
- No subscription engine with per-consumer cursors. No `EventStreamEmitter` for projection-to-store emission. No PII encryption.
Patchlevel event-sourcing
An event-sourcing library only. Subscription failures block the whole pipeline.
- An event-sourcing library only — no messaging, no async dispatch, no orchestrator, no distributed bus.
- Every downstream concern (cross-service communication, async messaging, multi-step coordination, shared retry/DLQ/PII middleware) becomes manual glue with separate libraries.
- **Production-critical failure mode:** the subscription engine advances a single position per subscription but doesn't isolate failure per partition — when one handler fails, the entire processing pipeline blocks until the failure is resolved or skipped.
- Tightly coupled to Doctrine DBAL — features like `#[Stream]` and Micro-Aggregates work only with `StreamDoctrineDbalStore`.
- Gap detection is opt-in per setup, not on by default. Crypto-shredding is scoped to the event store only — broker payloads and structured logs travel in cleartext.
- No `EventStreamEmitter` primitive. Rebuild supports blue-green via subscriber-id version bump, but a single projection still runs on one cursor — no parallel-worker rebuild for millions of events.
Ecotone
Scales with your event volume — from one cursor to N parallel workers.
- Covers what every PHP event-sourcing library covers — event-sourced aggregates, projections, snapshots, replay — and adds the operational layer they don't.
- Global tracked projections work for the early-stage system. As volume grows, switch to partitioned projections that rebuild in parallel across N workers: 50 million events that take 14 hours on a single-cursor rebuild finish in minutes when partitioned across 60 workers.
- Streaming projections consume directly from Kafka or RabbitMQ Streams.
- Blue-green deployments host the new projection version alongside the old one — atomic switch when ready, zero downtime.
- Default-on gap detection catches concurrent-commit events before they're silently skipped.
- End-to-end PII encryption follows the same `#[Sensitive]` field through the event store, the broker, and your structured logs.
Frequently asked questions
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