How to Build RealTime Laravel Apps with Pusher

The Laravel framework and Pusher are a great combination. Laravel helps you build elegant applications and at warp speed; Pusher helps you add real-time features to those apps in a fraction of the time it would take to build using your own infrastructure. In fact, Pusher has emerged as one of the Laravel community’s preferred tools to make apps realtime, thanks to the support of Taylor Otwell, Jeffrey Way, Matt Stauffer, and many more.

We recently wrote a set of tutorials covering How to Build Real-Time Laravel Apps with Pusher as part of a Workshop for Laracon EU. We’ve now opened up these tutorials for everybody and anybody to work through. The source has been opened up under the Commons Attribution 4.0 International License so you’re free to fork and adapt to suit your needs or even to run your own workshop.

Who are the tutorials for?

The tutorials cover the fundamentals of adding real-time features to a Laravel application using Pusher. It’s a useful resource for junior developers getting up to speed with Pusher, or as a reference to advanced developers who want to know what Pusher can help them achieve, and how.

How do I use the tutorials?

If you take a look at the Build Real-Time Laravel Apps with Pusher Workshop you’ll see it’s set out as a book – a GitBook in fact – consisting of background information and a number of tutorials. Although it started off as an instructor-lead workshop, it’s actually been written in a way that you can go through on your own or as part of an internal training session.

Of course, we’d love to run the workshop again at future events. So, if you’d like somebody from Pusher to be at your event to deliver the workshop please get in touch.

What does the GitBook cover?

Quite a lot:

• The fundamentals of real-time with Pusher
• Getting set up with Pusher
  • Using Laravel Pusher bridge package
  • The built-in Pusher Event Broadcast driver that comes with Laravel 5.1
• An overview of the Pusher Developer Tools
• Debugging server and client side integration
• How to build real-time features within your Laravel app
  • Notifications
  • Activity Streams
  • Authenticated Chat

It also gives you an overview of the additional features that Pusher offers. Hopefully we’ll be able to create tutorials for these over time.

What people think of the workshop

Loved it and am looking forward to using Pusher in my SaaS service soon! – Frank Michel, onduro

Great event, the docs are really thorough and I’m working through them again in my own time, thanks! – John Blackmore

Extensive and well explained docs with an informative session. – Nathan Dunn (@nathanjdunn)

Tutorial material was great and easy to follow step by step. We will be implementing Pusher in some products at work in the coming year. – Paul Graham

Fork.

We’ve been amazed by the input, feedback and adoption we’ve had from Laravel artisans. It’s great to be a tiny part of such a community.

So, hopefully the Build Real-Time Laravel Apps with Pusher tutorials will be a useful resource for those looking to add new features to apps or getting new team members up to speed.

But we don’t want it to end there.

Part of opening up this workshop as a GitBook of tutorials is the hope that others will contribute to the resource, share it with others, fork it and extend it. That’s why we’ve opened it up under Creative Commons; so anybody and everybody can take the resource and run with it.

Further Reading

In addition to the tutorials we’ve put together we’d recommend taking a look at these resources:

• Broadcasting events with Pusher.com & Socket.IO in Laravel 5.1, by Matt Stauffer.
• The three concise and excellent Laracast video tutorials.
• Real-time Apps with Laravel 5.1 and Event Broadcasting by Christopher Thomas.
• Build a Real-Time Chat Application With Modulus and Laravel 5 by Hüseyin Babal.