Real-Time Push Notifications in Laravel with Firebase

Implementing Firebase Push Notifications in a Laravel Application

Firebase push notifications are a highly useful feature in modern web and mobile applications that enable real-time updates and live user engagement. Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) offers an affordable and scalable way of adding push notifications to a Laravel application. In this tutorial, we will walk you through installing and implementing Firebase push notifications in Laravel to provide real-time updates.

Prerequisites

Before beginning, make sure that you’ve got these items:

• A general knowledge of the Laravel framework.
• Composer is installed on your system globally.
• A pre-existing Firebase project. If you have not created one yet, go to the Firebase Console and create a new project.

What Are Push Notifications?

Push notifications are point-to-point, real-time messages or alerts by a server onto a device user. They’re used very widely to the purpose of presenting updates, to elicit user interaction, and to establish an immediate source of communication. Since they manifest to be found immediately on one’s screen, they’re elegantly effective to the purpose of sending time-sensitive messages.

Push notifications are very helpful to the marketing team because they enable it to send bulk notifications at a lower cost than through the use of ordinary means like SMS. We can send push notifications for free with Firebase Cloud Messaging and are therefore a very efficient tool to utilize within Laravel applications.

Installation of Firebase in Laravel Application

Initializing Firebase SDK

Then, initialize Firebase SDK using the credentials you require. In your Laravel application, make a new directory resources/js/utils and within it a new file initialize.js. Within this file, export an instance of Firebase so that you can usethe Firebase Cloud Messaging API conveniently.

Retrieving the Device Token

To send push notifications, we need to retrieve the device token. This involves:

• Requesting user permission for notifications.
• Retrieving the device token using the Firebase SDK.
• Sending the token to the backend for storage.

We will add this functionality within AuthenticatedLayout, which is part of the default Laravel Breeze scaffold. Additionally, a VAPID key is required when requesting a token, which can be obtained from the Firebase Console.

Handling Background Notifications

Although it’s good to get notifications in the background however, most the users who are on your application at any given moment aren’t actively using your app. For instance the case where a user allows your application permission to send updates whenever a new article gets published, it may be necessary to push a alert at all times to users. In this scenario, the majority users might not be studying your blog when the notification is sent.

This is where notifications from the background are useful. Firebase lets us manage background notifications by the registration of an employee as a service.

We will need to create a file named firebase-messaging-sw.js in the public folder.
This service worker allows us to manage background messages since it will send messages to all users, regardless of whether they’re engaged in other reading or not using your app.
We have taken care of the front-end aspect that the app uses. We are now able to think about the method of distributing notifications.

Send Push Notifications

After we’ve got the token saved inside the database, you can send an email notification to the device of the user using the token that is stored in the database. There are many ways to send push notifications. You can send them to registered users, to every user who has signed up to push notifications, or even to a particular group of users. The possibilities are limitless. In my instance, I’m going to issue a message to users who are currently logged in.

To do so I will first need to get the currently logged-in user. Luckily Laravel provides a helper to do so. The auth()->user() helper returns the currently logged-in user. To get the fcm_token for the user we can just retrieve it using the helper auth()->user()->fcm_token.

We can then use the CloudMessage class from the Laravel Firebase package to prepare the notification.

Next, you Need to Design a Method to Notify you of the Changes.

Now, we’re finished with implementing the algorithm. I’ll add an online form to the Dashboard.jsx file so that I can forward the message. When we issue notifications via push notifications, they is now received by users who are currently logged in. It is possible to alter the process to notify everyone who has subscribed to receive push notifications.