lara-notifications
Creating a Simple Notification System in Laravel
Every once in a while, I build something small that ends up being surprisingly useful across multiple projects. This time, it was a lightweight notification system for Laravel. Nothing fancy — just something that lets me store and display notifications in a clean, flexible way.
I called it lara-notifications, and it’s now a reusable package I can pull into any Laravel project when I need basic app-level notifications.
Why this, when Laravel already has notifications?
Laravel’s built-in notification system is pretty robust. It supports mail, Slack, database, broadcast, and more. But for some projects, I just wanted something simpler — no queues, no channels — just persistent, in-app notifications I could show in the UI.
Think of it like the notifications you see in admin dashboards or CMS tools:
“New user signed up.”
“Payment failed.”
“Someone left a comment.”
That kind of stuff.
What it does
The package provides a simple Notification model with fields like title, body, type (info, success, error, etc.), and whether it’s been read. There’s a basic CRUD interface for creating and managing them, and I also included a component for rendering them in a Blade view.
Right now, the features are pretty minimal on purpose:
- Add and delete notifications
- Mark as read/unread
- Optional expiration
- Simple styling out of the box
I wanted it to feel lightweight and drop-in ready, without pulling in extra dependencies.
How I built it
This started as a one-off class I wrote for a dashboard project, but it made sense to turn it into a small package. Laravel makes this process pretty painless — I used artisan make:package to scaffold things and just built on top of the default structure.
There’s no custom frontend JS here — it’s all server-rendered Blade, which I actually prefer for stuff like this. It’s easy to slot into existing layouts and works with whatever framework or component system I’m already using.
Lessons learned
One of the things I realized working on this is how helpful it is to keep your utilities composable. Instead of trying to make this notification system handle everything, I kept it focused on just the UI layer. If I need emails or real-time events, I can still use Laravel’s built-in features.
Also, turning something from a one-off into a package made me think more about API design, config defaults, and usability for other developers (even if that developer is just “future me”).
Plans for the future
Right now it does what I need, but I might add:
- A Livewire/Alpine.js component for auto-updating
- Support for user-specific notifications (currently it’s app-level)
- More styles/themes for different UI use cases
- Better integration with Laravel policies and middleware
If any of that sounds useful to you, feel free to contribute or fork it.
Try it out
If you’re working on a Laravel app and need a dead-simple way to show persistent notifications to users (without dragging in extra complexity), give it a look:
https://github.com/badass-commits/lara-notifications
I’ll probably keep tweaking it here and there as I use it in more projects.
If you end up trying it out or extending it, I’d be curious to see how you’re using it.