Laravel: Up & Running, 3rd Edition

Chapter 15. Mail and Notifications

Sending an application’s users notifications via email, Slack, SMS, or another notification system is a common but surprisingly complex requirement. Laravel’s mail and notification features provide consistent APIs that abstract away the need to pay too close attention to any particular provider. Just like in Chapter 14, you’ll write your code once and choose at the configuration level which provider you’ll use to send your email or notifications.

Mail

Laravel’s mail functionality is a convenience layer on top of Symfony Mailer. Out of the box, Laravel comes with drivers for SMTP, Mailgun, Postmark, Amazon SES, Sendmail, and Log.

For all of the cloud services, you’ll set your authentication information in config/services.php. However, if you take a look, you’ll see there are already keys there—and in config/mail.php—that allow you to customize your application’s mail functionality in .env using variables like MAIL_MAILER and MAILGUN_SECRET.

Cloud-Based API Driver Dependencies

If you’re using any of the cloud-based API drivers, you may need to bring in external dependencies to support them.

If you’re using Mailgun, you’ll want to bring in Symfony’s Mailgun Mailer and its HTTP client:

composer require symfony/mailgun-mailer \
    symfony/http-client

If you’re using Postmark, you’ll pull in Symfony’s Postmark Mailer and its HTTP client:

composer require symfony/postmark-mailer \
    symfony/http-client

And if you use the SES driver, you’ll want to pull ...