Laravel SMS Catcher

A development-only Laravel package that captures SMS notifications and displays them in a beautiful, phone-inspired inbox – think Mailpit, but for your sms notification channel.

Screenshots

SMS Inbox Dashboard

Click to view full-size images:

The main inbox view displays all captured SMS messages with sender, recipient, and timestamp information.

Message Detail View

Click any message to see the full details in a beautiful phone-style preview, making it easy to verify how your SMS will appear to recipients.

Installation

Require the package in your application as a dev dependency. Until a tagged release is published you will need to target the dev-main branch explicitly:

composer require --dev michal78/laravel-sms-catcher

The package is auto-discovered by Laravel, but you can manually register the service provider if you have discovery disabled:

// config/app.php
'providers' => [
    // ...
    SmsCatcher\SmsCatcherServiceProvider::class,
];

Configuration

By default the dashboard is only enabled when your application is running in the local environment or when APP_DEBUG=true. You can override this behaviour via the SMS_CATCHER_ENABLED environment variable.

Publish the configuration file if you would like to customise the dashboard path or storage location:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=sms-catcher-config

This will create config/sms-catcher.php with the following options:

• enabled: Toggle the catcher on/off.
• route.prefix: URL prefix for the dashboard (defaults to /sms-catcher).
• route.middleware: Middleware stack wrapping the dashboard routes.
• storage_path: File that stores captured messages.

Usage

Trigger any Laravel notification that uses the sms channel and the payload will be recorded automatically. Visit the dashboard (default at http://your-app.test/sms-catcher) to see the inbox:

• Inbox view summarises each message.
• Click a message to view details and a phone-style preview.
• Clear individual messages or wipe the entire inbox.

Messages are stored as JSON within your application's storage folder (storage/logs/sms-catcher.json). The file is safe to delete; it will be recreated as new messages arrive. Since the storage/logs directory is typically excluded from version control in Laravel applications, the captured messages will not be committed to your repository.

Note: The catcher inspects notifications by invoking their toSms method. Ensure your notifications implement this method and return either a string, array, or object containing the text body.

Security

This package is intended for local development only. Do not enable it in production environments.