See Who's Online in your laravel app

In this article i will show you how to See Who’s Online in your laravel app using Laravel Package called activity With this package, you can easily see who’s online and how many guests are viewing your site. so lets get started with installation

Installation

To install this package, just follow these quick few steps.

Composer

As always, pull this package through composer by opening composer.json file and adding this within require:

"kim/activity": "~1.0"

Afterward, run either composer update or composer install.

Providers and Aliases

Next, open config/app.php and add this to your providers array:

KimActivityActivityServiceProvider::class

and this to your aliases array:

'Activity' => KimActivityActivityFacade::class

Session and Database Setup

Finally, you need to change your session configuration to use the database. Open the .env file, which should be at the root directory of your Laravel project. Then, change your session driver to database.

SESSION_DRIVER=database

Finally, publish the migration file and run it.

php artisan vendor:publish

php artisan migrate

Usage

This package will automatically update a user’s or guest’s most recent activity. To grab the most recent users and guests though, you can use the easy-to-use built-in methods.

Grabbing Most Recent Activities

Import the Activity facade at the top and then do a simple query.

// Import at the top
use Activity;


// Find latest users
$activities = Activity::users()->get();

// Loop through and echo user's name
foreach ($activities->users as $user) {
    echo $user->name . '<br>';
}

The users method will grab the most recent activities within the past 5 minutes. You can change the default timespan by specifying the minutes.

$activities = Activity::users(1)->get();   // Last 1 minute
$activities = Activity::users(10)->get();  // Last 10 minutes
$activities = Activity::users(60)->get();  // Last 60 minutes

You have other methods for your convenience to grab the latest activities by seconds or even hours.

$activities = Activity::usersBySeconds(30)->get();  // Get active users within the last 30 seconds
$activities = Activity::usersByMinutes(10)->get();  // Get active users within the last 10 minutes
$activities = Activity::usersByHours(1)->get();     // Get active users within the last 1 hour

$numberOfUsers = Activity::users()->count();        // Count the number of active users

Sorting Methods

In order to sort the activities by most and least recent, just use the mostRecent and leastRecent methods.

$activities = Activity::users()->mostRecent()->get();   // Get active users and sort them by most recent
$activities = Activity::users()->leastRecent()->get();  // Get active users and sort them by least recent

In addition to this, you can sort the user’s attributes by using the orderByUsers method. For example, rather than ordering by the most recent activity, lets say you want to order by the users’ name alphabetically. You can do this.

$activities = Activity::users()->orderByUsers('email')->get();

Grabbing the Guests

In order to grab the number of guests that are online, it’s just as intuitive as grabbing the users. For example:

$numberOfGuests = Activity::guests()->count();      // Count the number of active guests

See Who’s Online in your laravel app