Today we are talking about the UN, Open Source, and Drupal with guests Tim Lehnen & Henry Poole. We'll also cover Live Update as our module of the week.
Have you ever wanted parts of your Drupal pages, like blocks, views, or notifications, to update in real time without a page refresh, and without having to stand up extra infrastructure to do it? There's a module for that.
How old: created in Sep 2026 by Alessandro Feijó (afeijo) of Mindcore
Versions available: 1.0.0-alpha6, which works with Drupal 11 and 12
Maintainership
Actively maintained, latest release just a week ago
No security coverage yet, since it was just created and only has alpha releases
Test coverage
Documentation: a detailed README, plus a roadmap doc and a built-in demo page
Number of open issues: none
Usage stats:
14 sites
Module features and usage
Live Update positions itself as a generic real-time event layer for Drupal: modules publish events to named channels, and browsers subscribed to those channels update just the affected part of the page
Out of the box it uses plain HTTP polling back to Drupal, every 5 seconds by default, so it works on pretty much any host with no extra services
The transport is pluggable, though. Set it to automatic and it'll try WebSockets first, then an experimental Server-Sent Events submodule, then fall back to polling
For site builders, the base module adds an "Update this block live" checkbox to any block in the block layout, no code needed
There's also a whole suite of submodules: live-refreshing Views displays, single-entity updates, user presence blocks like "who's viewing this page", a notification bell with toasts, queue progress monitoring, remote JSON API tables, and an admin dashboard with an event monitor
One I think editorial teams will like: Live Update Form, which warns you when someone else is editing the same content you are
For developers, publishing is one line, a liveupdate_publish() helper or an injectable service, and on the front end you can either use data attributes in your markup or subscribe through a small JavaScript API
Every channel is access-controlled, and modules can weigh in on who's allowed to subscribe through by implementing hook_liveupdate_channel_access()
Under the hood, events are stored in their own database table with an optional time-to-live, and expired ones get cleaned up on cron. Polling clients just ask for anything newer than the last event ID they saw
There's a solid set of Drush commands too, including one to publish a test event straight from the command line, which is handy for debugging
Caveat: this is very new and still alpha, so I'd treat it as one to watch and experiment with rather than deploy into production today
It's the push transport Live Update is designed around. A small Drupal module, plus a standalone gateway written in Go that gives browsers a native WebSocket connection
Drupal stays in charge: it checks channel access, hands the browser a short-lived signed token, and sends signed events to the gateway, which fans them out to connected clients
You run the gateway as its own service, with systemd or Docker, behind a TLS reverse proxy. The README is very clear that you shouldn't try to launch it from PHP
It can scale horizontally using Redis or Valkey pub/sub, one gateway can serve multiple Drupal sites with isolated tenants, and if it ever goes down, Live Update falls back automatically and switches back once it recovers
Same maintainer, created at the start of October, and also alpha, with an alpha1 release and one reported site so far
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