In this article, we're going to explore the notification system in the Laravel web framework. The notification system in Laravel allows you to send notifications to users over different channels. Today, we'll discuss how you can send notifications over the mail channel.

Basics of Notifications

During application development, you often need to notify users about different state changes. It could be either sending email notifications when the order status is changed or sending an SMS about their login activity for security purposes. In particular, we're talking about messages that are short and just provide insight into the state changes.

Laravel already provides a built-in feature which helps us achieve something similar—notifications. In fact, it makes sending notification messages to users a breeze and a fun experience!

The beauty of that approach is that it allows you to choose from different channels notifications will be sent on. Let's quickly go through the different notification channels supported by Laravel.

• Mail: The notifications will be sent in the form of email to users.
• SMS: As the name suggests, users will receive SMS notifications on their phone.
• Slack: In this case, the notifications will be sent on Slack channels.
• Database: This option allows you to store notifications in a database should you wish to build a custom UI to display it.

Among different notification channels, we'll use the Message Model

To start with, let's create the messages table in the database.

$php artisan migrate<br>

That should create the NewMessage Notification Class

Since each notification in Laravel is represented by a separate class, we need to create a custom notification class that will be used to notify users. Let's use the following artisan command to create a custom notification class: mail channel to send notifications to users, the mail channel to send notifications.

At the end, you need to make sure that you implement the necessary methods according to the channel type configured in the database channel, which stores notifications in a database, you don't need to configure the Notification facade.

If the entity model class utilizes the IlluminateNotificationsNotifiable<code>IlluminateNotificationsNotifiable trait, then you could call the notify<code>notify method on that model. The AppUser<code>AppUser class implements the Notifiable<code>Notifiable trait, and thus it becomes the notifiable entity. On the other hand, you could also use the IlluminateSupportFacadesNotification<code>IlluminateSupportFacadesNotification Facade to send notifications to users.

Let's go through the index<code>index method of the controller.

In our case, we're going to notify users when they receive a new message. So we've tried to mimic that behavior in the index method in the first place.

Next, we've notified the recipient user about a new message using the notify method on the $toUser object, as it's the notifiable entity.

$php artisan migrate<br>

You may have noticed that?we also pass the $fromUser object in the first argument of the __construct method, since we want to include the from username in a message.

On the other hand, if you want to mimic it using the Notification facade, it's pretty easy to do so using the following snippet.

$toUser->notify(new NewMessage($fromUser));<br>

As you can see, we've used the send method of the Notification facade to send a notification to a user.

Go ahead and open the URL https://your-laravel-site-domain/notify/index in your browser. If you're not logged in yet, you'll be redirected to the login screen. Once you're logged in, you should receive a notification email at the email address which is attached with the user 1.

You may be wondering how the notification system detects?the to address when we haven't configured it?anywhere yet. In that case, the notification system tries to find the email property in the notifiable object. And the AppUser object class already has that property since we're using the default Laravel authentication system.

However, if you would like to override this behavior and you want to use a different property other than email, you just need to define the following method in your notification class.

Notification::send($toUser, new NewMessage($fromUser));<br>

Now, the notification system should look for the email_address property instead of the email property to fetch the to address.

And that's how to use the notification system in Laravel. That brings us to the end of this article as well!

Conclusion

What we've gone through today is one of the most useful yet least discussed features in Laravel—notifications. It allows you to send notifications to users over different channels.

After a quick introduction, we implemented a real-world example which demonstrated how to send notifications over the mail channel. In fact, it's really handy in the case of sending short messages about state changes in your application.

For those of you who are either just getting started with Laravel or looking to expand your knowledge, site, or application with extensions, we have a variety of things you can study on Envato Market.

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