A Simple Chatroom Application with Laravel and Pusher(Part 3)

A quick review… I came across an example for a chatroom app that utilized Laravel and Pusher, a connection and messaging app that provides real-time content relay. It also touches on several features within Laravel, such as database connection, model generation, Vue.js integration, and eventing. If you haven’t started yet, go to Part 1 in this series to get started.

Defining the Route

Now we can define our routes. In routes/web.php, we can set this up by replacing the default Route with:

Auth::routes();

Route::get('/', 'ChatsController@index');
Route::get('messages', 'ChatsController@fetchMessages'); 
Route::post('messages', 'ChatsController@sendMessage'); 

Now a couple things we want to consider. First, we have changed the /home route so we will have to change the $redirectTo variable in both app/Http/Controllers/Auth/LoginController.php and app/Http/Controllers/Auth/RegisterController.php.

We will change it to:

protected $redirectTo = '/'; 

which sends it to our newly created path after a user registers or logs in. Second, the ChatsController defined in our routes is not set up yet, so lets do that now.

ChatsController

We will begin by using artisan to create the controller in the terminal: php artisan make:controller ChatsController which gives us a bare-bones controller. Quite a bit we have to do here. First, let’s build the construct to validate our user is logged in:

public function __construct() { 
	$this->middleware('auth'); 
}

Since we are using the Auth middleware, we’ll have to include the use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Auth; dependency.

Next, we will create an index function that returns a view(we still have to create) to display our chatroom.

    /**
    * Show chats
    * 
    * @return \Illuminate\Http\Response
    */
    public function index()
    {
        return view('chat');
    }

Next, we will define a fetchMessages function that returns all the message the user can see:

    /**
    * Fetch all messages
    *
    * @return Message
    */
    public function fetchMessages()
    {
        return Message::with('user')->get();
    }

Again, we will want to make sure we have access to our Messages by including it in our dependencies use App\Message;

And then we want to make sure that any new message created by the user persists to the database

    /** 
    * Persist message to the database
    *
    * @param  Request $request
    * @return Response
    */
    public function sendMessage(Request $request)
    {
        $user = Auth::user();

        $message = $user->messages()->create([
            'message' => $request->input('message')
        ]);

        return ['status' => 'Message Sent!'];
    }

The entire controller should look like this:

    <?php

    namespace App\Http\Controllers;

    use App\Message;
    use Illuminate\Http\Request;
    use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Auth;


    class ChatsController extends Controller
    {
        public function __construct()
        {
            $this->middleware('auth');
        }

        /**
        * Show chats
        * 
        * @return \Illuminate\Http\Response
        */
        public function index()
        {
            return view('chat');
        }

        * Fetch all messages
        *
        * @return Message
        */
        public function fetchMessages()
        {
            return Message::with('user')->get();
        }

        /**
        * Persist message to the database
        *
        * @param  Request $request
        * @return Response
        */
        public function sendMessage(Request $request)
        {
            $user = Auth::user();

            $message = $user->messages()->create([
                'message' => $request->input('message')
            ]);

            return ['status' => 'Message Sent!'];
        }
    }

In the next post we’ll build out the blade templates that will add and display our messages. View Part 4 here.