Installation

Installation

Home · Quick start

Requirements

GameQ 5 requires:

• PHP 8.1 or newer;
• ext-curl for HTTP-backed and Epic Online Services queries;
• ext-libxml, ext-simplexml, and ext-xml for XML protocols;
• permission for the PHP process to make the required outbound UDP, TCP, TLS, and HTTP connections.

ext-bz2 is optional. It is only needed when a Source/A2S server returns a bzip2-compressed split response; uncompressed Source responses and other protocols work without it. If such a response is received without the extension, GameQ raises a protocol exception instead of attempting an unsafe or non-portable external-command fallback.

PHP 8.1 through 8.5 are covered by the regular test matrix. PHP 8.6 coverage is experimental until PHP 8.6 is stable.

Composer

Install the maintained fork with:

composer require softcreatr/gameq:^5.0

Then load Composer in your application:

require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

The package name is softcreatr/gameq. The upstream austinb/gameq package does not install this fork's version 5 code.

Run Composer's platform check on the deployment host if dependencies were built elsewhere:

composer check-platform-reqs

Standalone autoloader

Download a release archive, unpack it outside the web root when possible, and load the bundled autoloader:

require_once '/path/to/GameQ/src/GameQ/Autoloader.php';

Composer remains preferable because it validates required PHP extensions, reports the optional ext-bz2 suggestion, and produces a deterministic dependency graph.

Verify the installation

<?php

require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

$gameQ = new GameQ\GameQ();

echo $gameQ::class, PHP_EOL;

If this cannot load GameQ\GameQ, verify the autoloader path and confirm that the web or worker process uses the same PHP installation as the command line.

Continue with the quick start.