Connect Media SMS for Laravel

Send SMS and SMS notifications from Laravel with Connect Media, a Kenyan bulk SMS provider delivering to Safaricom, Airtel and Telkom numbers and to 190+ countries. Built on the official connectmedia/sms PHP client.

• ConnectMedia::send('0712345678', 'Hello') from anywhere in your app
• A notification channel so $user->notify(...) can go out by SMS, queued or not
• Kenyan numbers normalised for you (0712…, +254 712…, 254712…)
• Default sender ID from config, scheduling, balance, sent history and replies
• php artisan connectmedia:test to check your setup in seconds

Supports Laravel 10, 11 and 12 on PHP 8.1+.

Installation

composer require connectmedia/laravel

Add your credentials to .env:

CONNECTMEDIA_API_KEY=your-64-character-api-key
CONNECTMEDIA_SENDER=YourBrand

Get an API key by creating a free account at dashboard.connectmedia.co.ke and generating one under Profile, then API keys. Your sender ID must be registered first; see sender IDs.

Check everything works:

php artisan connectmedia:test 0712345678
php artisan connectmedia:balance

To customise settings, publish the config file:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=connectmedia-config

Sending SMS

use ConnectMedia\Laravel\Facades\ConnectMedia;

ConnectMedia::send('0712345678', 'Your order has shipped.');

// Several recipients, a different sender ID and a scheduled time
ConnectMedia::send(['0712345678', '0733000111'], 'Fees are due on Friday.', [
    'sender'     => 'YourSchool',
    'scheduleAt' => now()->addDay()->setTime(9, 0),
]);

ConnectMedia::balance();
ConnectMedia::history(limit: 20);
ConnectMedia::inbox();

You can also type-hint ConnectMedia\Laravel\ConnectMedia for dependency injection.

Notifications

Add toConnectMedia() to a notification and put 'connectmedia' in via():

use ConnectMedia\Laravel\ConnectMediaMessage;
use Illuminate\Bus\Queueable;
use Illuminate\Contracts\Queue\ShouldQueue;
use Illuminate\Notifications\Notification;

class OrderShipped extends Notification implements ShouldQueue
{
    use Queueable;

    public function __construct(private string $orderNumber) {}

    public function via($notifiable): array
    {
        return ['connectmedia'];
    }

    public function toConnectMedia($notifiable): ConnectMediaMessage
    {
        return ConnectMediaMessage::create("Order {$this->orderNumber} has shipped.")
            ->from('MYSHOP'); // optional, defaults to CONNECTMEDIA_SENDER
    }
}

toConnectMedia() may also return a plain string.

Tell Laravel which number to use on your notifiable model:

public function routeNotificationForConnectmedia($notification): ?string
{
    return $this->phone;
}

If you don't define it, the channel uses the model's phone_number or phone attribute. Notifiables without a number are skipped.

On-demand notifications work too:

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Notification;

Notification::route('connectmedia', '0712345678')->notify(new OrderShipped('A1023'));

Implement ShouldQueue (as above) to send large batches through your queue workers.

Errors

API errors throw ConnectMedia\Sms\ConnectMediaException with $e->apiCode and $e->apiMessage, for example 100 invalid API key, 101 insufficient balance, 104 invalid recipients. A missing API key throws a RuntimeException telling you to set CONNECTMEDIA_API_KEY.

Testing

composer install
composer test

Links

• Connect Media developer docs
• Bulk SMS API for Kenya
• Pricing: no minimum top-up, credit never expires
• Other SDKs: PHP, Python, Node.js

License

MIT. See LICENSE.