A couple of days ago I wrote about the micro-blogging platform that I was developing for my own use, and how in time I would be setting it up to automatically cross-post to my Twitter feed. Well it turns out it was a whole lot easier than I expected using Laravel’s built in Notifications feature (I haven’t really talked about the underlying code for Shortform, but it is largely built on the awesome Laravel PHP framework).

One of the great things about this particular feature is that the community has really embraced it and built a ton of additional notification channel integrations over and above the email, SMS and Slack channels that ship with Laravel - all curated over at laravel-notification-channels.com. One of these channels is, of course, Twitter via a package by Christoph Rumpel.

Setting Up

First, install the package into your Laravel project:

composer require laravel-notification-channels/twitter

Next, add the provider to config/app.php

'providers' => [
    ...
     NotificationChannels\Twitter\TwitterServiceProvider::class,
],

Finally, create a new app on Twitter and add your config to the config/services.php file and your .env:

...
'twitter' => [
    'consumer_key' => env('TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY'),
    'consumer_secret' => env('TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET'),
    'access_token' => env('TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN'),
    'access_secret' => env('TWITTER_ACCESS_SECRET')
],

Tip: you can retrieve the necessary credentials by going to the Keys and Access Tokens tab of you Twitter app page. The consumer key and secret will be at the top of the page, and you will need to generate a new access token and key below that.

Sending the Tweet

For my setup, I have a Post model that I’ll be using to send out the tweet from, but you can use any model you already have. Just add the Notifiable trait to it:

class Post extends Model
{
    use Notifiable;

Next, create your notification class:

php artisan make:notification PostPublished

Open up this file and adjust the via method and add a toTwitter method. Here is the completed class:

<?php

namespace App\Notifications;

use Illuminate\Notifications\Notification;
use NotificationChannels\Twitter\TwitterChannel;
use NotificationChannels\Twitter\TwitterStatusUpdate;

class PostPublished extends Notification
{
    public function via($notifiable)
    {
        return [TwitterChannel::class];
    }

    public function toTwitter($notifiable)
    {
        return new TwitterStatusUpdate('Hey I just posted something');
    }
}

Now to call this all you have to do is grab a Post and send it off:

$post = Post::find(1);
$post->notify(new PostPublished());

The final change we need to make is to update the toTwitter method in the PostPublished class, so it includes the actual post data. Since this is a micro-blogging platform I want to preserve as much of the original post as possible, so I’ll follow some simple rules:

  1. If the post is 140 characters or less, I’ll just send it as-is;
  2. If the post is more than 140 characters, I will truncate it and append a link back to the original post
public function toTwitter($notifiable)
{
    if(strlen($notifiable->body) <= 140)
    {
        $post = $notifiable->body;
    } else
    {
        $post = str_limit($notifiable->body, 120) . ' ' . url($notifiable->uri);
    }

    return new TwitterStatusUpdate($post);
}

Adding Media

The TwitterStatusUpdate class also has a method for adding images to tweets. In the case of Shortform, my posts can optionally have a large featured/hero image as the subject (like Instagram), so in those cases I would also like to push the image across to be displayed natively in Twitter:

public function toTwitter($notifiable)
{
    if(strlen($notifiable->body) <= 140)
    {
        $post = $notifiable->body;
    } else
    {
        $post = str_limit($notifiable->body, 120) . ' ' . url($notifiable->uri);
    }

    $tweet = new TwitterStatusUpdate($post);

    if($image = $notifiable->featuredImage)
    {
        return $tweet->withImage([$notifiable->featuredImage]);
    }

    return $tweet;
}

And that’s all there is to it! What I originally thought was going to be a more complicated task was solved in a matter of minutes - all I do now is trigger the PostPublished notification every time a post is created.

I think next I will quickly add this to this blog (also on a custom-made platform) to push new posts into Twitter. All I will need to do is use the post title - trimmed if over 120-or-so characters - and append the post URL!