Sending web push notifications from Laravel

Question

I have a website running Laravel in the back-end, where users can create reports for other users.

When the report is created I would like to send a push notification to recipient user's desktop.

Do I need to use services like Pusher, OneSignal?

Any useful site with examples would be appreciated.

Solution

Your question

You could use Pusher, Redis/Socket.io, Pubnub, etc. Which one to use? well, this is more an opinion-based question.

This services broadcast events, then in your client apps (like your web front-end) you configure the client-side libraries of the service you choose to subscribe (to channels) and listen to those events.

The documentation explains it better.

Examples/tutorials

Pusher

This is a tutorial published by the Pusher team.

Redis/Socket.io

This one is a Laracast series about this.

Just google.

---

Update

Since a couple of months ago, there's another alternative, a package created exclusively for Laravel:

Laravel WebSockets

• This is the post talking about the package and its inner working.
• This is the repo.
• Here you have the documentation.

Comments

[Faustas Butkus]

Do these services works even when the browser is down?

[Kenny Horna]

Your server will fire events, those events are received by the service who will breadcast the events, the clients that wil be listening to those events wil be notified.

[ctf0]

there is a difference between websockets "browser have to be opened" and web push "browser doesnt have to be opened"

[Alexanderp]

Try this Laravel package pushmix/laravel-web-notification. To push web notifications you will require to obtain user permission and store device token to push notifications to.