Laravel Tutorials / updated: December 02, 2016

Automatically Send Tweets through Laravel Notifications

One of the exciting new features that came out in Laravel 5.3 was Laravel Notifications, and they allow you to send quick updates through a variety of services.

Included in the Laravel core is support for Email, Slack, and Nexmo but you can build your own or visit the community project where a lot of integrations have already been built.

As I am working on this site I wanted to automatically send a tweet whenever a new post is published and a package, for this has already been created by Christoph Rumpel. Let’s take a look at how easy it is to integrate the Twitter package and automatically tweet out new posts.

Twitter Package Setup

First, install the package:

composer require laravel-notification-channels/twitter

Next, add the provider to config/app.php

...
'providers' => [
    ...
     NotificationChannels\Twitter\TwitterServiceProvider::class,
],
...

Finally, create a new app on Twitter and add your config to the config/services.php file and your .env:

...
'twitter' => [
    'consumer_key'    => getenv('TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY'),
    'consumer_secret' => getenv('TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET'),
    'access_token'    => getenv('TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN'),
    'access_secret'   => getenv('TWITTER_ACCESS_SECRET')
]
...

Tip: The access_token and access_secret can be found on the “Keys and Access Tokens” tab of your Twitter app page.

Sending the Tweet

For my setup, I have a Post model that I’ll be using to send out the tweet from, but you can use any model you already have. Just add the Notifiable trait to it:

class Post extends Model
{
    use Notifiable;

Next, create your notification class:

php artisan make:notification PostPublished

Open up this file and adjust the via method and add a toTwitter method. Here is the completed class:

<?php

namespace App\Notifications;

use Illuminate\Notifications\Notification;
use NotificationChannels\Twitter\TwitterChannel;
use NotificationChannels\Twitter\TwitterStatusUpdate;

class PostPublished extends Notification
{
    public function via($notifiable)
    {
        return [TwitterChannel::class];
    }

    public function toTwitter($notifiable) {
        return new TwitterStatusUpdate('You should follow @laravelnews https://laravel-news.com/');
    }
}

Now to call this all you have to do is grab a Post and send it off:

$post = Post::find(1);
$post->notify(new PostPublished());

The final change we need to make is to update the toTwitter method in the PostPublished class, so it includes the actual post data.

public function toTwitter($post) {
    return new TwitterStatusUpdate($post->title .' https://laravel-news.com/'. $post->uri, [$post->featured_image]);
}

The Post model is passed into the method, and then I just pull out the title, the full path to the post and add the post’s featured image as a second param.

That’s it!

These notification channels are simplifying the integration with a lot of external services that in the past would have been a chore to setup manually. If you’d like to go further here is a tutorial on how to send notifications to Telegram