MessageBird / Laravel Notifications

This package adds the ability to send notifications to WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and SMS via MessageBird as a valid Laravel Notification, making life easier to utilise notifications and queueing.

Usage

To use this package, run composer require messagebird/laravel-notification. Once it completes, you can implement the following methods on your notification:

• toMessageBirdWhatsApp
• toMessageBirdFacebook
• toMessageBirdSms

See examples/Notification/MerryChristmas.php for a complete example.

To send a notification, specify the channel you'd like to use:

// To a user
$user->notify(new \App\Notifications\MerryChristmas());

// To any person
Notification::route(
    'messagebird-whatsapp',
    'YOUR_NUMBER'
)->notify(new \App\Notifications\MerryChristmas());

The available channels are:

• messagebird-sms
• messagebird-whatsapp
• messagebird-facebook
• messagebird-viber_service_msg

As each notification receives a $notifiable (usually a user) it can decide how best to route the information. In this case, it checks the via_whatsapp property on the user and sends via WhatsApp if it's true. Otherwise it falls back to email

public function via($notifiable)
{
    return $notifiable->via_whatsapp ? ['messagebird-whatsapp'] : ['mail'];
}

Message Types

MessageBird supports multiple message types, depending on the channel that you're sending to. The Text type is the safest if you want to deliver to all channels:

public function toMessageBirdWhatsApp($notifiable)
{
    return (new \MessageBird\Notifications\Message\Text)
        ->content('This is a message being sent to WhatsApp');
}

Caveats

For some channels you need to send a templated message before you can send a free text message due to spam control rules. Here's an example of how to use a preapproved template intended for two-factor authentication purposes:

public function toMessageBirdWhatsApp($notifiable)
{
    return (new \MessageBird\Notifications\Message\Template)
        ->name("whatsapp:hsm:technology:messagebird:verify")
        ->parameters([
            ["default" => "Your Brand"],
            ["default" => "64873"],
            ["default" => "10"],
        ]);
}

If the recipient replies to your message, you can send them Text type messages without any issues

Configuration

Authentication

This notifications package is built on top of Nexmo/laravel-notification and I've adepted it for MessageBird purposes.

For this to work, you need to set your base API URL for the MessageBird Programmable Conversations API and the Access Key from your MessageBird developer dashboard in the .env file:

MESSAGEBIRD_API_CONVERSATIONS_URL=api_url
MESSAGEBIRD_ACCESS_KEY=my_api_key

Setting the from address

You can set a from address via the .env file. This package will look for provider specific entries before falling back to MESSAGEBIRD_FROM.

MESSAGEBIRD_FROM_SMS=""
MESSAGEBIRD_FROM_WHATSAPP=""
MESSAGEBIRD_FROM_MESSENGER=""
MESSAGEBIRD_FROM="" # This is the default if any of the above aren't set

Alternatively, you can set a from address for a single notification by calling the ->from() method on a message:

public function toMessageBirdWhatsApp($notifiable)
{
    return (new Text)->content('Merry Christmas!')->from("YOUR_ID");
}