Automate Future Notifications and Reminders with Laravel Snooze

Laravel Snooze is a package, which simplifies automating future notifications and reminders in Laravel.

The package’s readme has some typical use-cases for this package:

• Reminder system (1 week before appt, 1 day before, 1 hour before, etc)
• Follow-up surveys (2 days after purchase)
• On-boarding Email Drips (Welcome email after sign-up, additional tips after 3 days, upsell offer after 7 days)
• Short-Term Recurring reports (send every week for the next 4 weeks)

Why use this package?

• Ever wanted to schedule a future notification to go out at a specific time? (was the delayed queue option not enough?)
• Want a simple on-boarding email drip?
• How about happy birthday emails?

Common use cases

• Reminder system (1 week before appt, 1 day before, 1 hour before, etc)
• Follow-up surveys (2 days after purchase)
• On-boarding Email Drips (Welcome email after sign-up, additional tips after 3 days, upsell offer after 7 days)
  Short-Term Recurring reports (send every week for the next 4 weeks)

Installation

• Install via composer
• composer require thomasjohnkane/snooze
• php artisan migrate

Publish Configuration File

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Thomasjohnkane\Snooze\ServiceProvider" --tag="config"

Usage

Using the model trait
Snooze provides a trait for your model, similar to the standard Notifiable trait. It adds a notifyAt() method to your model to schedule notifications.

use Thomasjohnkane\Snooze\Traits\SnoozeNotifiable;

class User extends Model {
    use SnoozeNotifiable;

    // ...
}
// Schedule a birthday notification
$user->notifyAt(new BirthdayNotification, Carbon::parse($user->birthday));

// Schedule for a week from now
$user->notifyAt(new NextWeekNotification, Carbon::now()->addDays(7));

// Schedule for new years eve
$user->notifyAt(new NewYearNotification, Carbon::parse('last day of this year'));

Using the ScheduledNotification::create helper
You can also use the create method on the ScheduledNotification.

ScheduledNotification::create(
     Auth::user(), // Target
     new ScheduledNotificationExample($order), // Notification
     Carbon::now()->addHour() // Send At
);
This is also useful for scheduling anonymous notifications (routed direct, rather than on a model).

$target = (new AnonymousNotifiable)
    ->route('mail', 'hello@example.com')
    ->route('sms', '56546456566');

ScheduledNotification::create(
     $target, // Target
     new ScheduledNotificationExample($order), // Notification
     Carbon::now()->addDay() // Send At
);

An important note about scheduling the snooze:send command

Creating a scheduled notification will add the notification to the database. It will be sent by running snooze:send command at (or after) the stored sendAt time.

The snooze:send command is scheduled to run every minute by default. You can change this value (sendFrequency) in the published config file. Available options are everyMinute, everyFiveMinutes, everyTenMinutes, everyFifteenMinutes, everyThirtyMinutes, hourly, and daily.

The only thing you need to do is make sure schedule:run is also running. You can test this by running php artisan schedule:run in the console.

Setting the send tolerance

If your scheduler stops working, a backlog of scheduled notifications will build up. To prevent users receiving all of the old scheduled notifications at once, the command will only send mail within the configured tolerance. By default this is set to 24 hours, so only mail scheduled to be sent within that window will be sent. This can be configured in the snooze.php config file.

Cancelling Scheduled Notifications

$notification->cancel();

Note: you cannot cancel a notification that has already been sent.

Rescheduling Scheduled Notifications

$rescheduleAt = Carbon::now()->addDay(1)

$notification->reschedule($rescheduleAt)

Note: you cannot reschedule a notification that has already been sent or cancelled. If you want to duplicate a notification that has already been sent or cancelled, pass a truthy second parameter along with the new send date; reschedule($date, true), or use the scheduleAgainAt($date) method shown below

Duplicate a Scheduled Notification to be sent again

$notification->scheduleAgainAt($newDate);

Check a scheduled notification’s status

// Check if a notification is already cancelled

$result = $notification->isCancelled(); // returns a bool

// Check if a notification is already sent

$result = $notification->isSent(); // returns a bool

Conditionally interrupt a scheduled notification

If you’d like to stop an email from being sent conditionally, you can add the shouldInterrupt() method to any notification. This method will be checked immediately before the notification is sent.

For example, you might not send a future drip notification if a user has become inactive, or the order the notification was for has been canceled.

public function shouldInterrupt($notifiable) {
    return $notifiable->isInactive() || $this->order->isCanceled();
}

If this method is not present on your notification, the notification will not be interrupted. Consider creating a shouldInterupt trait if you’d like to repeat conditional logic on groups of notifications.

Running the Tests

composer test