Deskmo: A Multichannel Helpdesk Sample Application using Nexmo and Laravel

This application featured in Laravel News! Read the installments:

• Part 1: Sending and receiving SMS Laravel Notifications with Nexmo
• Part 2: Text-To-Speech calls with Laravel and Nexmo
• Part 3: Real-time messaging with Nexmo and Laravel

If you'd just like to play with the application as-is, you can run the application locally on your machine or use the docker setup, either way read the Pre-Requisites first.

Pre-Requisites

Clone this repo to get your own copy of the code.

Copy either .env.example or .env.docker to .env (depending on how you intend to run the project) so that you can add configuration.

Stand by with ngrok

You can use ngrok to give the project a local URL (also use this if you have docker). I find it helpful to start the tunnel now, so I have the URL to use in the configuration steps with my nexmo number! The Laravel app will run on port 8000 so the ngrok command will be:

ngrok http 8000

Copy the URL, you'll see this used later as [ngrok_url].

Prepare to work with Nexmo

If you don't already have a Nexmo account, you can sign up here.

You will need your API key and secret for your nexmo account.

Install the Nexmo CLI tool - it's used in the next section.

Buy and configure a Nexmo number

We will need a number for sending/receiving messages and calls. You can either buy a number through your account dashboard, or using the CLI:

nexmo number:search [country] --sms

Choose any number from the resulting list and buy it:

nexmo number:buy [number] --confirm

We need to create an application and link it to our number for voice calls. Use your Ngrok URL in this command:

nexmo app:create deskmo [ngrok_url]/webhook/answer [ngrok_url]/webhook/event --keyfile private.key

The command outputs a confirmation about the keyfile that it created, and an application UUID. Copy this UUID, it's used as [app_id] in the later examples. First we'll use it to link the number to the new app:

nexmo link:app [number] [app_id]

Now we will configure the number for SMS (this is the easy part):

nexmo link:sms [number] [ngrok_url]/ticket-entry

That's the Nexmo side of things ready to go. Just a couple more pieces to include before we see the app in action!

Sign up for IBM Speech to Text

If you want to be able to interact with the application with voice, we'll need to be able to transcribe the words. For this we'll use the IBM Speech to Text Service.

• Sign in to the IBM Dashboard and click "Create Resource".
• Choose "Speech to Text"
• Navigate to the service credentials and copy the apikey value.

Now that the external services are set up, we need to add some configuration to the Laravel application itself.

Configure Nexmo settings in the Laravel app

In the .env file, we have a few things to add:

.env key	Value
NEXMO_KEY	Your API key, you can find this your account dashboard.
NEXMO_SECRET	Your API secret, you can find this your account dashboard.
NEXMO_NUMBER	The [number] you bought for this application
NEXMO_APPLICATION_ID	The [app_id] you created
NEXMO_PRIVATE_KEY	The path to the private.key file created when the application was created
PUBLIC_URL	Your [ngrok_url] so we can build the webhook URLs correctly
IBM_API_KEY	The apikey for the Speech to Text service to enable you to speak back when the app calls you and speaks the new ticket details

You may also find it useful to set APP_ENV to "development" and APP_DEBUG to "true" in case there are any errors - this way you will see them in the web interface.

Finally, check the config/services.php file and update the nexmo block there to look like this:

'nexmo' => [
    'key' => env('NEXMO_KEY'),
    'secret' => env('NEXMO_SECRET'),
    'sms_from' => env('NEXMO_NUMBER'),
    'private_key' => env('NEXMO_PRIVATE_KEY'),
    'application_id' => env('NEXMO_APPLICATION_ID'),
],

We're ready to run! Instructions for running locally or using the docker setup are available.

Run Locally

(You did already follow the Pre-Requisites, right??)

Run composer install.

You can run php artisan key:generate while you're here!

Configure a database

Edit .env to configure your database settings.

Then run php artisan migrate.

Run the application

Don't look now, I think we made it! Start the server: php artisan serve and then visit http://localhost:8000. Well done!!

Use Docker

(You did already follow the Pre-Requisites, right??)

There is a docker-compose setup ready for you to use.

Start the platform with docker-compose up.

Before you try to access the application, we need to configure the Laravel application:

• docker-compose exec web php artisan key:generate sets up the token for the application
• docker-compose exec web php artisan migrate prepares the database for use

If both of those commands completed successfully, then your app is ready for you! Look at http://localhost:8000

Database Access on Docker

This should all work "out of the box" but if you need direct access to the database, you can:

• Run docker-compose exec postgres bash
• Then at the bash prompt type psql -U deskmo
• To connect to the database (you already realised it's Postgres), type \c deskmo

Usage

You will need to register before you begin

Contributing

We love questions, comments, issues - and especially pull requests. Either open an issue to talk to us, or reach us on twitter: https://twitter.com/NexmoDev.