Appointment reminders in PHP with Laravel

About

This application demostrates how to use the Twilio API to send automated reminders about upcoming appointments.

Read the full tutorial here!

Implementations in other languages:

.NET	Java	Python	Ruby	Node
Done	Done	Done	Done	Done

Set up

Requirements

• PHP >= 7.2.5 and composer
• Node.js
• A Twilio account - sign up

Twilio Account Settings

This application should give you a ready-made starting point for writing your own application. Before we begin, we need to collect all the config values we need to run the application:

Config Value	Description
Account Sid	Your primary Twilio account identifier - find this in the Console.
Auth Token	Used to authenticate - just like the above, you'll find this here.
Phone number	A Twilio phone number in E.164 format - you can get one here

Local development

After the above requirements have been met:

1. Clone this repository and cd into it

   git clone git@github.com:twilio-labs/appointment-reminders-laravel.git
   cd appointment-reminders-laravel

2. Set your environment variables

   cp .env.example .env

   See Twilio Account Settings to locate the necessary environment variables.

3. Install dependencies

   make install

4. Build the frontend assets

   npm run dev

5. Run the application

   make serve

6. Navigate to http://localhost:8000

   That's it!

The background scheduler

The messages are sent using Laravel's scheduler. This requires us to execute php artisan schedule:run every minute. For development executing the command in an infinite loop should work just fine:

make scheduler

Docker

If you have Docker already installed on your machine, you can use our docker-compose.yml to setup your project.

1. Make sure you have the project cloned.
2. Setup the .env file as outlined in the Local Development steps.
3. Run docker-compose up.

Unit and Integration Tests

You can run the Unit and Feature tests locally by typing:

php artisan test

Cloud deployment

Additionally to trying out this application locally, you can deploy it to a variety of host services. Here is a small selection of them.

Please be aware that some of these might charge you for the usage or might make the source code for this application visible to the public. When in doubt research the respective hosting service first.

Service
Heroku

Resources

• The CodeExchange repository can be found here.

Contributing

This template is open source and welcomes contributions. All contributions are subject to our Code of Conduct.

License

MIT

Disclaimer

No warranty expressed or implied. Software is as is.