musonza/chat

To add the chat system to your Laravel ^5.4 application, install the package via Composer:

composer require musonza/chat

After installing the package, publish the database migrations and the musonza_chat.php configuration file to your Laravel config folder using the following command:

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Musonza\Chat\ChatServiceProvider"

Once the assets are published, run the migrations to create the necessary database tables for the chat system:

php artisan migrate

Configuration options can be found in config/musonza_chat.php.

You can encrypt message bodies using Laravel's built-in encryption (AES-256-CBC). To enable this, set 'encrypt_messages' => true in config/musonza_chat.php.

Encryption is transparent: new messages are encrypted before storage, and decrypted automatically when retrieved. Existing unencrypted messages remain readable in a hybrid mode.

Warning: Encryption uses your application's APP_KEY. If you change your APP_KEY, previously encrypted messages will become unreadable.

Musonza Chat is a Laravel service provider. To set up the package, you need to publish its migrations and configuration files to your application.

Use the following Artisan commands to publish the assets:

Publish Migrations: php artisan vendor:publish --tag=chat.migrations

Publish Configuration: php artisan vendor:publish --tag=chat.config

When accessing the sender attribute on a Message, the system attempts to retrieve details from the participant's underlying model. You can customize what data is returned by implementing one of the following on your participant model (e.g., your User model):

1. Define a getParticipantDetailsAttribute() accessor.
2. Override the getParticipantDetails() method.

If you do not provide a custom implementation, the system will return the participant's attributes, potentially filtered by Chat::senderFieldsWhitelist().

For real-time chat, cursor-based pagination is recommended to prevent duplicate messages when new ones arrive. Use getMessagesWithCursor() and pass the next_cursor from the previous response into the cursor parameter of the next request.

// Get first page
$messages = Chat::conversation($conversation)
    ->setParticipant($participantModel)
    ->setCursorPaginationParams([
        'perPage' => 25,
        'sorting' => 'asc',
    ])
    ->getMessagesWithCursor();

// Get next page using cursor from previous response
$nextCursor = $messages->nextCursor()?->encode();

$moreMessages = Chat::conversation($conversation)
    ->setParticipant($participantModel)
    ->setCursorPaginationParams([
        'perPage' => 25,
        'sorting' => 'asc',
        'cursor' => $nextCursor,
    ])
    ->getMessagesWithCursor();

Use the Chat::message() fluent API to send messages. The default type is text. You can specify a custom type() (e.g., image, attachment) and provide additional metadata using data().

// Send a text message
$message = Chat::message('Hello')
            ->from($model)
            ->to($conversation)
            ->send();

// Send a message with a custom type
$message = Chat::message('http://example.com/img')
	->type('image')
	->from($model)
	->to($conversation)
	->send();

// Send a message with custom data (e.g., attachments)
$message = Chat::message('Attachment 1')
	->type('attachment')
	->data(['file_name' => 'post_image.jpg', 'file_url' => 'http://example.com/post_img.jpg'])
	->from($model)
	->to($conversation)
	->send();

The package uses getParticipantDetails() to represent participants in a uniform way. By default, it returns an array containing a name column. You can customize this by adding an Eloquent Accessor getParticipantDetailsAttribute to your model to return any custom array structure.

public function getParticipantDetailsAttribute()
{
    return [
        'name' => $this->someValue,
        'foo' => 'bar',
    ];
}