Streaming AI Responses in Laravel with Server-Sent Events

Short summary

This tutorial shows how to stream AI chat responses in Laravel using Server-Sent Events instead of WebSockets. It covers the openai-php client's createStreamed() method, Laravel 11's response()->eventStream(), and a critical session-lock release step. The approach delivers first tokens in ~300ms instead of waiting for full completion, with no extra infrastructure required.

• •Use SSE (not WebSockets) for one-directional AI response streaming in Laravel
• •openai-php createStreamed() returns a Generator of token deltas for memory-efficient streaming
• •Critical: release session lock before streaming to avoid blocking all other user requests

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.