Keep a MQTT Client Connection always active - php

Question

I am using CloudMQTT as a MQTT broker in my Pub-Sub based application. I am using my publisher to publish data to the CloudMQTT server over a topic, and I plan to subscribe to the broker on my webpage to recieve the transmitted information.
I am using this procedure to create a Client(subscriber): https://www.cloudmqtt.com/docs-php.html
Code goes as follows:
// subscribe.php
require("phpMQTT.php");
$host = "hostname";
$port = port;
$username = "username";
$password = "password";
$mqtt = new phpMQTT($host, $port, "ClientID".rand());
if(!$mqtt->connect(true,NULL,$username,$password)){
exit(1);
}
//currently subscribed topics
$topics['topic'] = array("qos"=>0, "function"=>"procmsg");
$mqtt->subscribe($topics,0);
while($mqtt->proc()){
}
$mqtt->close();
function procmsg($topic,$msg){
echo "Msg Recieved: $msg";
}
Here is the phpMQTT.php file: https://github.com/bluerhinos/phpMQTT/blob/master/phpMQTT.php
However, the issue in this case is that it recieves data only when the webpage is open.. I want to keep the connection alive even if the webpage is not open to always recieve published messages, how can I do it?
EDIT : I might be open to using some other technology on the server to handle this subscription process, if anyone can recommend some alternatives

Answer 1

PHP's typically mode of operation is to start a process, wait for an HTTP connection, handle the request and then start a new process. This doesn't fit well with the typical MQTT mode of having a long-running process; hence closing the MQTT connection when you close the web page.
It is possible to subscribe to a MQTT topic in a long-running CLI PHP script, but you will have to have some other mechanism to keep the process running. There are a lot of different ways of doing this, depending on your preferences and operating system:
a script started using /etc/rc.local at system startup
using a init.d script
using a process manager, such as DJB's daemontools or runit
If you are using Ubuntu, then upstart is a popular mechanism
Searching stackoverflow finds the following related question and several answers:
Run php script as daemon process