Programming Tutorials

Send push notifications using Expo tokens in PHP

By: Gren in PHP Tutorials on 2023-05-19  

To send push notifications using Expo tokens in PHP, you need to use Expo's Push Notifications API. Here's an example of how you can modify your PHP code:

function sendPushMsg($expoToken, $msg, $data) {
  $expoURL = 'https://exp.host/--/api/v2/push/send';
  
  $notification = array(
    'title' => 'Smart Apps',
    'body' => $msg,
    'sound' => 'default'
  );
  
  $postData = array(
    'to' => $expoToken,
    'title' => 'Smart Apps',
    'body' => $msg,
    'sound' => 'default',
    'data' => $data,
    'priority' => 'high'
  );

  $headers = array(
    'Content-Type: application/json',
    'Accept: application/json',
    'Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate',
    'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_EXPO_API_TOKEN'
  );

  $ch = curl_init($expoURL);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, 'POST');
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, json_encode($postData));
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);

  $result = curl_exec($ch);
  curl_close($ch);
  
  return json_decode($result, true);
}

1. $msg: This variable represents the main message or content of the push notification. It typically contains a brief text that will be displayed to the user as the notification message. In the example code, it is used as the body property of the notification payload.

2. $data: This variable represents additional data that you can include in the push notification payload. It can be used to send custom data or metadata along with the notification. The $data variable in the code is passed as the data property of the push notification payload.

Here's an example to illustrate the usage:

$expoToken = 'ExponentPushToken[xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]';
$msg = 'New message received';
$data = array(
  'type' => 'message',
  'sender' => 'John Doe',
  'timestamp' => '2023-05-18 15:30:00'
);

$result = sendPushMsg($expoToken, $msg, $data);

In this example, the $msg variable contains the notification message "New message received", which will be displayed to the user as the notification content. The $data variable is an associative array that includes additional data related to the message, such as the message type, sender information, and timestamp. This data can be accessed by the client-side application when the push notification is received.

You can customize the contents of $msg and $data based on your specific use case and the information you want to send to the client application with the push notification.

Make sure to replace YOUR_EXPO_API_TOKEN with your actual Expo API token, which you can obtain from the Expo Developer Dashboard. This code uses the curl library to make a POST request to Expo's Push Notifications API endpoint with the necessary headers and payload containing the Expo token, notification data, and other optional parameters.

Note that the above code assumes you have already obtained the Expo push notification token from the client-side using Expo's expo-notifications library or similar method. You should pass the Expo token as the $expoToken parameter when calling the sendPushMsg function.

Remember to handle any errors or exceptions that may occur during the API request and response handling in your PHP code.