To follow this tutorial, you need to have PHP and Laravel installed on your machine. When building web applications, it is not uncommon to find some sort of in-app notification system that will notify you instantly when someone carries out an action related to you or your account. On Facebook, you will be notified when someone likes your status, or when someone comments on your profile. We will replicate this feature by creating a web notifications system using and . Laravel Pusher What we would be building After this tutorial we would demonstrate how we can have a small web application show notifications using Laravel and Pusher. It would be similar to how websites like Facebook show notifications. Here is a preview of what we would be building: Setting up your Pusher application Create a , if you have not already, and then set up your application as seen in the screenshot below. Pusher account Setting up your Laravel application You can create a new Laravel application by running the command below in your terminal: laravel new laravel-web-notifications After that, we will need to install the Pusher PHP SDK, you can do this using Composer by running the command below: composer require pusher/pusher-php-server When Composer is done, we will need to configure Laravel to use Pusher as its broadcast driver, to do this, open the file that is in the root directory of your Laravel installation. Update the values to correspond with the configuration below: .env PUSHER_APP_ID=322700BROADCAST_DRIVER=pusher // Get the credentials from your pusher dashboardPUSHER_APP_ID=XXXXXPUSHER_APP_KEY=XXXXXXXPUSHER_APP_SECRET=XXXXXXX Important Note: If you’re using the EU or AP Cluster, make sure to update the options array in your _config/broadcasting.php_ config since Laravel defaults to using the US Server. You can use all the options the Pusher PHP Library supports. Open and uncomment the . config/app.php App\Providers\BroadcastServiceProvider::class Creating our Laravel and Pusher application Now that we are done with configuration, let us create our application. First we would create an class that would broadcast to Pusher from our Laravel application. Events can be fired from anywhere in the application. Event php artisan make:event StatusLiked This will create a new class in the directory. Open the contents of the file and update to the following below: StatusLiked app/Events <?php namespace App\Events; use Illuminate\Queue\SerializesModels;use Illuminate\Foundation\Events\Dispatchable;use Illuminate\Broadcasting\InteractsWithSockets;use Illuminate\Contracts\Broadcasting\ShouldBroadcast; class StatusLiked implements ShouldBroadcast{ use Dispatchable, InteractsWithSockets, SerializesModels; public $username; public $message; /** * Create a new event instance. * * @return void */ public function __construct($username) { $this->username = $username; $this->message = "{$username} liked your status"; } /** * Get the channels the event should broadcast on. * * @return Channel|array */ public function broadcastOn() { return ['status-liked']; }} Above, we have implemented the interface and this tells Laravel that this event should be broadcasted using whatever driver we have set in the configuration file. ShouldBroadcast We also have a constructor that accepts two parameters, username and verb. We will get back to this later on. We assigned these variables to class properties named the same way. It is important to set the visibility of the properties to ; if you don’t, the property will be ignored. public Lastly, we set the channel name to broadcast on. Creating the application views We will keep it simple and create a single view where you can see a navigation bar with a notification icon. The icon will be updated when new notifications are available without the need to refresh the page. The notifications are ephemeral in this tutorial by design; you can extend the functionality and make it last longer after the page reloads if you so desire. Open the file and replace it with the HTML below. welcome.blade.php <!DOCTYPE html><html lang="en"> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge"> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> <title>Demo Application</title> <link rel="stylesheet" href="//maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.7/css/bootstrap.min.css" integrity="sha384-BVYiiSIFeK1dGmJRAkycuHAHRg32OmUcww7on3RYdg4Va+PmSTsz/K68vbdEjh4u" crossorigin="anonymous"> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/css/bootstrap-notifications.min.css"> <!--[if lt IE 9]> <script src="https://oss.maxcdn.com/html5shiv/3.7.3/html5shiv.min.js"></script> <script src="https://oss.maxcdn.com/respond/1.4.2/respond.min.js"></script> <![endif]--> </head> <body> <nav class="navbar navbar-inverse"> <div class="container-fluid"> <div class="navbar-header"> <button type="button" class="navbar-toggle collapsed" data-toggle="collapse" data-target="#bs-example-navbar-collapse-9" aria-expanded="false"> <span class="sr-only">Toggle navigation</span> <span class="icon-bar"></span> <span class="icon-bar"></span> <span class="icon-bar"></span> </button> <a class="navbar-brand" href="#">Demo App</a> </div> <div class="collapse navbar-collapse"> <ul class="nav navbar-nav"> <li class="dropdown dropdown-notifications"> <a href="#notifications-panel" class="dropdown-toggle" data-toggle="dropdown"> <i data-count="0" class="glyphicon glyphicon-bell notification-icon"></i> </a> <div class="dropdown-container"> <div class="dropdown-toolbar"> <div class="dropdown-toolbar-actions"> <a href="#">Mark all as read</a> </div> <h3 class="dropdown-toolbar-title">Notifications (<span class="notif-count">0</span>)</h3> </div> <ul class="dropdown-menu"> </ul> <div class="dropdown-footer text-center"> <a href="#">View All</a> </div> </div> </li> <li><a href="#">Timeline</a></li> <li><a href="#">Friends</a></li> </ul> </div> </div> </nav> <script src="//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.4/jquery.min.js"></script> <script src="//js.pusher.com/3.1/pusher.min.js"></script> <script src="//maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.7/js/bootstrap.min.js" integrity="sha384-Tc5IQib027qvyjSMfHjOMaLkfuWVxZxUPnCJA7l2mCWNIpG9mGCD8wGNIcPD7Txa" crossorigin="anonymous"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> var notificationsWrapper = $('.dropdown-notifications'); var notificationsToggle = notificationsWrapper.find('a[data-toggle]'); var notificationsCountElem = notificationsToggle.find('i[data-count]'); var notificationsCount = parseInt(notificationsCountElem.data('count')); var notifications = notificationsWrapper.find('ul.dropdown-menu'); if (notificationsCount <= 0) { notificationsWrapper.hide(); } // Enable pusher logging - don't include this in production // Pusher.logToConsole = true; var pusher = new Pusher('API_KEY_HERE', { encrypted: true }); // Subscribe to the channel we specified in our Laravel Event var channel = pusher.subscribe('status-liked'); // Bind a function to a Event (the full Laravel class) channel.bind('App\\Events\\StatusLiked', function(data) { var existingNotifications = notifications.html(); var avatar = Math.floor(Math.random() * (71 - 20 + 1)) + 20; var newNotificationHtml = ` <li class="notification active"> <div class="media"> <div class="media-left"> <div class="media-object"> <img src="https://api.adorable.io/avatars/71/`+avatar+`.png" class="img-circle" alt="50x50" style="width: 50px; height: 50px;"> </div> </div> <div class="media-body"> <strong class="notification-title">`+data.message+`</strong> <!--p class="notification-desc">Extra description can go here</p--> <div class="notification-meta"> <small class="timestamp">about a minute ago</small> </div> </div> </div> </li> `; notifications.html(newNotificationHtml + existingNotifications); notificationsCount += 1; notificationsCountElem.attr('data-count', notificationsCount); notificationsWrapper.find('.notif-count').text(notificationsCount); notificationsWrapper.show(); }); </script> </body></html> This is mostly a lot of Bootstrap noise so we will isolate the important parts, mostly Javascript. We include the , and then we added the javascript block that does the magic. Let us look at some snippets of the javascript block: Pusher javascript library // Enable pusher logging - don't include this in production// Pusher.logToConsole = true; // Initiate the Pusher JS libraryvar pusher = new Pusher('API_KEY_HERE', { encrypted: true}); // Subscribe to the channel we specified in our Laravel Eventvar channel = pusher.subscribe('status-liked'); // Bind a function to a Event (the full Laravel class)channel.bind('App\\Events\\StatusLiked', function(data) { // this is called when the event notification is received...}); PROTIP : By default, Laravel will broadcast the event using the event’s class name. However, you may customize the broadcast name by defining a broadcast as method on the event: public function broadcastAs() { return ‘event-name’; } The code above just initializes the Pusher JS library and subscribes to a channel. It then sets a callback to call when the event broadcasted is received on that channel. Testing our set up Finally to test our set up, we will create a route that manually calls the event. If everything works as expected, we will get a new notification anytime we hit the route. Let’s add the new route: Route::get('test', function () { event(new App\Events\StatusLiked('Someone')); return "Event has been sent!";}); Now we can start a PHP server using Laravel so we can test our code to see if it works. $ php artisan serve Conclusion In this article we have been able to leverage the power of Pusher to create a modern web notifications system and it was very easy. This is just scratching the surface of what can be really done using Pusher. The example was just to show you the possibilities. The code is available on , you can star, fork and play around with it. GitHub This post was first published on . Pusher
