Laravel SMS Catcher: A Local Dashboard for SMS Notifications

Laravel SMS Catcher is a local development helper by Michal Skogemann that captures outgoing SMS notifications. Much like Mailpit does for email, it gives you a visual dashboard to inspect the text body and metadata of your SMS messages while working locally.

#Main Features

• Phone-style preview — Displays text inside a virtual device mockup with a selector to check how line wrapping looks on different screen widths.
• Environment-safe defaults — Blocks the dashboard on production environments, running only in local or debug modes.
• Customizable routing — Lets you customize the dashboard URL path and wrap routes with your own middleware.
• Flat-file storage — Stores messages in a local JSON file in your logs directory, bypassing the need for database tables or migrations.
• Inbox management — Clears individual messages or wipes the entire inbox from the dashboard.

#How It Works

The catcher hooks into Laravel's notification system. When you send a notification via the sms channel, the package intercepts it by calling toSms on the notification class. It then writes the sender, recipient, body, and timestamp to storage/logs/sms-catcher.json.

Writing to a flat JSON file means there are no database tables or migrations to set up. Since Laravel excludes the storage/logs directory from git by default, your test messages won't clutter your repository.

#Dashboard and Phone Previews

The dashboard comes with light and dark themes. Clicking a message in the sidebar opens a detail view with a phone-style mockup. A device selector dropdown lets you switch between screen sizes to see how text wrapping, spacing, and line breaks look on different devices.

#Configuration

Out of the box, the inbox is available at /sms-catcher whenever your app runs in the local environment or has debug mode turned on. If you need to change these settings, you can publish the configuration file:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=sms-catcher-config

The resulting config/sms-catcher.php file lets you:

• Toggle the catcher using the SMS_CATCHER_ENABLED env variable.
• Set a custom URL prefix (route.prefix).
• Adjust the middleware stack (route.middleware).
• Change where the messages are stored (storage_path).

#Installation

You can install the package as a development dependency via Composer:

composer require --dev michal78/laravel-sms-catcher

To capture your messages, make sure your notification classes have a toSms() method that returns a string, array, or an object containing the message body.

You can inspect the source code, report issues, and read the documentation on the GitHub repository.