How to create real time notification in laravel without pusher

Notification is an important part of today's web applications where applications are real time in nature. This article explains you also provides you with base scripts for creating real time notification in laravel without Pusher.

As the web has become the powerhouse of the software industry and primarily for those companies whose work is service based or freelance based work. Real time is the key component in almost all web apps now because each and every user wants information in real time.

So today we will see how to create real time notification in Laravel without Pusher. Let's start

First let's create a project in any drive.
```
laravel new realtime_notification
```
Note : if you do not have Laravel installed, please read this article first.
We will use a very good and performant package called beyondcode laravel-webockets package. It is built on the top of pusher package. That's why it uses random pusher credentials to run. So let's add this package to our project.
```
composer require beyondcode/laravel-websockets
```
Now we need another package called pusher-php-server. Type in command
```
composer require pusher/pusher-php-server
```

Now open .env file in any code editor and find

BROADCAST_DRIVER=pusher

. Then set pusher credentials

PUSHER_APP_ID=12345
        PUSHER_APP_KEY=12345
        PUSHER_APP_SECRET=12345
        PUSHER_APP_CLUSTER=mt1

Now let's publish migration file for storing the details of laravel-websockets package.

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="BeyondCode\LaravelWebSockets\WebSocketsServiceProvider" --tag="migrations"

Migrate the database now. Enter command
```
php artisan migrate
```

Now let's publish config file for laravel-websockets package.

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="BeyondCode\LaravelWebSockets\WebSocketsServiceProvider" --tag="config"

Now let's start websockets server and test that if it is working fine. enter command
```
php artisan websockets:serve
```
Open browser and enter http://127.0.0.1:8000/laravel-websockets and you will get a dashboard like this :
Now we will create an event which get triggered every time when notification has to be pushed. For that enter command
```
php artisan make:event RealTimeMessage
```

Open App/Events/
RealTimeMessage.php and type in the following code:

    <?php

    namespace App\Events;

    use Illuminate\Broadcasting\Channel;
    use Illuminate\Broadcasting\PrivateChannel;
    use Illuminate\Contracts\Broadcasting\ShouldBroadcast;
    use Illuminate\Queue\SerializesModels;

    class RealTimeMessage implements ShouldBroadcast
    {
        use SerializesModels;

        public string $message;

        public function __construct(string $message)
        {
            $this->message = $message;
        }

        public function broadcastOn(): Channel
        {
            return new Channel('events');
        }
    }

Go to config/broadcasting.php file and type in the following script in pusher block.

    'pusher' => [
        'driver' => 'pusher',
        'key' => env('PUSHER_APP_KEY'),
        'secret' => env('PUSHER_APP_SECRET'),
        'app_id' => env('PUSHER_APP_ID'),
        'options' => [
            'cluster' => env('PUSHER_APP_CLUSTER'),
            'encrypted' => true,
            'host' => '127.0.0.1',
            'port' => 6001,
            'scheme' => 'http'
        ],
    ],

Now we have completed the backend stuff now it's time to create frontend to receive the notification. We will be creating frontend in pure Javascript but it can be done in Laravel Echo.

Open resources/views/
welcome.blade.php and type in the following script.

<!DOCTYPE html>
    <html lang="{{ str_replace('_', '-', app()->getLocale()) }}">
        <head>
            <meta charset="utf-8">
            <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

            <title>Getting RealTime Notification</title>
            <meta name="csrf-token" content="{{ csrf_token() }}">
            <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.7/css/bootstrap.min.css">

            
        </head>
        <body class="antialiased">

            <div class="container">
                <div style="display:none;" class="alert alert-success" id="notification_panel">kfdghfdkjgh</div>
            
            
                <div class="jumbotron" style="margin-top:15px;">
                    <h1 class="display-4">Realtime Notification</h1>
                    <p class="lead">When you fire an event from websockets dashboard, you will receive notification here on the top.</p>                
                    </p>
                </div>
            
            
            </div>

        </body>

        
        <script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.5.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
        <script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@popperjs/core@2.6.0/dist/umd/popper.min.js"></script>
        <script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@5.0.0-beta2/dist/js/bootstrap.min.js"></script>

        <script src="https://js.pusher.com/6.0/pusher.min.js"></script>
        <script>
        
        let a_tok = document.querySelector('meta[name="csrf-token"]').content;

    //suscribing to pusher channel
    Pusher.logToConsole = false;
    var pusher = new Pusher('12345', {
        cluster: 'mt1',
        broadcaster: 'pusher',
        //key: process.env.MIX_PUSHER_APP_KEY,
        //cluster: process.env.MIX_PUSHER_APP_CLUSTER,
        forceTLS: false,
        wsHost: window.location.hostname,
        wsPort: 6001,
    });

    var channel = pusher.subscribe('events');
    channel.bind('App\\Events\\RealTimeMessage',(d) => {
        if(d.msg == null || d.msg == ""){
            $("#notification_panel").removeClass('alert alert-success');
            $("#notification_panel").addClass('alert alert-danger');
            $("#notification_panel").text('Notification was blank');
            $("#notification_panel").fadeIn();
            setTimeout(function(){
                $("#notification_panel").fadeOut();
            },2000);
        }
        else{                
            $("#notification_panel").removeClass('alert alert-danger');
            $("#notification_panel").addClass('alert alert-success');
            $("#notification_panel").text(d.msg);
            $("#notification_panel").fadeIn();
            setTimeout(function(){
                $("#notification_panel").fadeOut();
            },2000);
        }
    });
        
        
        </script>
        </html>

Now scripting is done.
Its time to test. For testing open your app at 127.0.0.1:8000 in one window and laravel-websockets at 127.0.0.1:8000/laravel-websockets in another window.
Now in laravel websockets dashboard you will three fields :

In the first field type in the channel name you used in RealTimeMessage.php to broadcast your event.

In second field type in your event like this App\Events\RealTimeMessage.

And finally in the third field type in the message like this

{
        "msg":"this is sample notification"
    }

That is it for this article. Now you can also trigger the event from controller and also change the msg property text in json.