Installation

Require the package. The service provider and the Messages facade alias are auto-discovered — no manual registration:

composer require roundly-consulting/messages-for-laravel

Composer also pulls in the three sibling packages Messages is built on — enums-for-laravel, media-library-for-laravel and package-toolkit-for-laravel. There is nothing to install or configure for them separately.

Key type first

If your participating models (usually User) are keyed by uuid or ulid, set that before you migrate — it is baked into the schema (see Key types):

MESSAGES_KEY_TYPE=uuid   # bigint (default) | uuid | ulid — your models' primary key type

Publish-only migrations

Migrations are not loaded automatically — a bare php artisan migrate creates nothing until you publish them. Messages stores attachments through media-library-for-laravel, installed with it, whose media table is publish-only too — publish both, then migrate:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag="media-migrations"
php artisan vendor:publish --tag="messages-migrations"
php artisan migrate

Skip media-migrations and the first send fails, because every send looks up the message’s attachments, whether or not it has any:

no such table: media

The eleven messages migrations land in database/migrations under timestamped filenames that preserve the order the tables depend on each other in, so they interleave correctly with your own. They create messaging_threads, messaging_participants and messaging_messages — all with soft deletes and a configurable key type.

Optional publishes

php artisan vendor:publish --tag="messages-config"
php artisan vendor:publish --tag="messages-translations"
php artisan vendor:publish --tag="messages-resources"
php artisan vendor:publish --tag="messages-notifications"

• messages-config — config/messages.php; every key has an env-backed default, so this is only needed to override.
• messages-translations — the system-message, preview and exception strings.
• messages-resources — editable copies of the JSON API resources in App\Http\Resources\Messages (app/Http/Resources/Messages).
• messages-notifications — an editable copy of the new-message notification in App\Notifications\Messages (app/Notifications/Messages).

Next steps

• Implement ParticipatesInMessaging and add the HasMessaging trait to every model that sends or takes part.
• Open a DM with Messages::direct() or a group with Messages::start() — or the trait’s conversationWith() and startConversationWith().
• Optionally turn on broadcasting, notifications and system messages via env.