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Hey everybody,
I would like to integrate notifications into my Laravel project. However, I'm a little lost and don't quite understand where to start.
My goal is to end up sending a push message for mobile apps and for the website, either push messages as well or something else like a toasts message.
However, in the end, for both mobile apps and my website, I want to have an overview of all notifications (including historical ones). Like you know from Facebook or Instagram: A little bell and if you click on it, you see all historical (both read and unread) notifications. You can then mark them as read or not.
But now I am facing the problem of implementation. It is clear that I have to store the notifications in the database at Laravel. This is the only way I can realize my plan with the overview of all notifications and mark single notifications as read or unread.
But how do I implement the idea that the notifications are stored in the database and at the same time sent as a push message to Android and iOS or via the web?
And is it mandatory to use Pusher (https://pusher.com) or Firebase Cloud Messaging for this and if yes, which of the two services would you recommend?
Many greetings and thanks!
@frazecolder Laravel notifications are channel-based. You can dispatch a notification to various “channels”, including the database: https://laravel.com/docs/10.x/notifications#database-notifications
So, for each notification class, define a toArray method and then the notification instance will also be saved to the database, allowing you to query them and show them to the user in your web UI.
@martinbean Can you give me a code example how I can define database and push notifications both as channels?
@FrazeColder Laravel already has a channel for database notifications. I linked you to the documentation.
You’ll need to install other channels to handle native push notifications for iOS etc as it requires a bit of set-up to allow you to send push notifications to a user’s device: https://laravel-notification-channels.com/apn/
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