ikeogu/appointment-reminders-laravel

Example App and Tutorial content for Appointment Reminders in PHP | Laravel

Appointment reminders in PHP with Laravel

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

Read the full tutorial here!

Running locally

The Web Application

1. Clone the repository and cd into it.

2. Install the application dependencies with Composer

   $ composer install

3. The application uses PostgreSQL as persistence layer. If you don't have it already, you should install it. The easiest way is by using Postgres.app.

4. Create a database.

   $ createdb appointments

5. Copy the sample configuration file and edit it to match your configuration.

   $ cp .env.example .env

   You can find your TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID and TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN under your Twilio Account Settings.

   You can buy Twilio phone numbers at Twilio numbers TWILIO_NUMBER should be set to the phone number you purchased above.

6. Generating an APP_KEY:

   $ php artisan key:generate

7. Running the migrations:

   $ php artisan migrate

8. Running the application using Artisan.

   $ php artisan serve

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:

while true; do php artisan schedule:run; sleep 60; done