Push Notifications

#Overview

NativePHP for Mobile uses Firebase Cloud Messaging to send push notifications to your users.

#Setting up your app

Once you create a Firebase account and create a project you will be offered to download a google-services.json file.

This file contains the configuration for your app and is used by the Firebase SDK to retrieve tokens for each device using your app.

Simply drag this file into the root of your Laravel project, enable push_notifications in the config it will be used automatically.

You will see more instructions on how to configure your app in the Firebase documentation, you can ignore all of those, NativePHP handles all of that for you.

#Receiving Push Tokens

To receive push notifications, you must register a listener for the event. For example, take a look at how easy it is to listen for a TokenGenerated event in Livewire:

use Livewire\Attributes\On;
use Livewire\Component;
use Native\Mobile\Facades\System;
use Native\Mobile\Events\PushNotification\TokenGenerated;
 
class PushNotifications extends Component
{
    public function render()
    {
        return view('livewire.system.push-notifications');
    }
 
    #[On('native:' . TokenGenerated::class)]
    public function handlePushNotifications(string $token)
    {
        // Do something with the token...
    }
}

Because of the nature of mobile applications you need an api server to handle these tokens. You can use Laravel's built-in Http facade to POST the token to your server, on the server side you need to associate the token with the "user" that owns the device.

We strongly recommend using Sanctum to handle this for you.

#The flow

Your app authenticates users against your own api server, when users create an account or login the server validates and authenticates the user and passes back a Sanctum token.

The token is stored in your apps session and is used on subsequent requests to the api server.

When a push notification is received, the token is sent to your api server and the server stores it for the user who sent it.

Optionally, you can have a HasMany relationship between your users and devices, this allows you to associate a device with a user and then use the device's token to send push notifications to that users devices.

#Sending Push Notifications

Once you have the token, you may use it from your server-based applications to trigger Push Notifications directly to your user's device. We use a package like google/apiclient to send the notifications.

This is the exact code used by the NativePHP Kitchen Sink App (available soon on all app stores and GitHub):

Route::group(['middleware' => 'auth:sanctum'], function () {
    Route::post('send-push-notification', PushNotificationController::class)->name('send-push-notification');
});

namespace App\Http\Controllers;
 
use App\Jobs\SendPushNotification;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
 
class PushNotificationController extends Controller
{
    public function __invoke(Request $request)
    {
        $token = $request->get('token');
 
        $request->user()->update([
            'push_token' => $token
        ]);
 
        SendPushNotification::dispatch($token)->delay(now()->addMinutes(1));
    }
}