Laravel/PHP TCP Socket Connection?

So I'm currently in a workflow where I'm using Laravel as an API as well as all the web-related stuff and then proxying the requests from nodejs into laravel.

I instead want to cut out nodejs completely because I find it incredibly painful to work with, and I find PM2 painful to work with as well, and recently my nodejs project has been leaking memory like crazy and I've been unable to find the cause for it.

So are there any decent resources on how to do some TCP socket stuff with Laravel/PHP directly?

Also as a side question, does anyone know any good file manipulation libraries for Laravel/PHP? E.g a library that will allow me to view/edit bytes (and other stuff like this) inside a file with somewhat ease.