I remember when node was new and everyone was trying those real-time chat tutorials. After following the cliché tutorial i realized in order to share the session between node and the rest of the php app I had to basically hack it.

I ended up having to read the source code of ReactPHP and add the functionality to my framework. Sure it is not one line of code like with node, but it's not rocket science either. I would definitely recommend trying ReactPHP to see the benefits.