About triggerdesign/hermes

triggerdesign/hermes is a Laravel package for a fully featured messaging package for laravel.. It currently has 16 GitHub stars and 705 downloads on Packagist (latest version 2.1). Install it with composer require triggerdesign/hermes. Discover more Laravel packages by triggerdesign or browse all Laravel packages to compare alternatives.

Last updated August 20, 2026

Hermes

A fully featured messaging package for Laravel 4, 5 and 5.1.

You can have conversations between multiple users to build a messenger with rooms or just a private 1to1 message system.

The Idea

Conversation -> hasMany Users
Conversation -> hasMany Messages
Message -> hasOne User
Message -> hasMany MessageState
MessageState -> hasMany User

Like you see in the table above, Hermes is able to differ between different users when it comes to reading a message.

For example:

There is a conversation between 3 users: User1, User2 and User3.

User1 writes a message and User2 reads it.

Then we have three MessageStates for this new message:

MessageState for User1 is ‘own’
MessageState for User2 is ‘read’
MessageState for User3 is ‘unread’

##Install

Step 1: Composer.json

For Laravel 5

    "require": {
        ...
        "triggerdesign/hermes": "2.*"
        }

For Laravel 4

    "require": {
        ...
        "triggerdesign/hermes": "1.0"
        }

Run a composer update.

Step 2: app.php

	'providers' => array(
	    ...
        \Triggerdesign\Hermes\HermesServiceProvider::class
	);
	...
	'aliases' => array(
	    ...
        'Messaging' => Triggerdesign\Hermes\Facades\Messaging::class
   );

Step 3: Publish migrations and config

    php artisan vendor:publish
    php artisan migrate

Now you have the 4 tables that we need for user conversations.

Step 4: Use the user trait

You should use a trait inside your User model:

<?php

use Triggerdesign\Hermes\Models\UserTrait as HermesTrait;
...

class User extends BaseModel implements ConfideUserInterface
{
    use HermesTrait;
    ...

Usage

Start a new conversation or find an existing one

Start a converstion between user with the ID 1 and the user with the ID 2. If there is allready one it will return the existing conversation.

    //This will start a new conversation between user 1 and 2 or find an existing one
    $conversation = Messaging::startConversation([1,2]);
    
    //or try to find one on your own
    $conversation =  Messagging::findConversations($user_ids, $arguments, $limit);

Now you have access to these functions and attributes:

    //All messages in one conversation
    $conversation->messages;
    
    //Add a message
    $conversation->addMessage($content);
    
    $conversation->addUser($user);
    
    $conversation->latestMessage();
    $conversation->unreadMessages();
    
    $conversation->isUnread(); //conversation has unread messages
    $conversation->doRead(); //call this after a user has read his messages

You can also have groups of messages like in facebook. Several messages are collected into a group of messages, if they is not too much time in between and if they are all from one sender.

    //Build an array of \Triggerdesign\Hermes\Classes\MessageGroup
    $messageGroups = $conversation->buildGroups();
    
    ...
    
    //now you can iterate throgh these groups and buld your own messenger
    @foreach($messageGroups as $messageGroup)
        <b>{{ $messageGroup->getUser()->name }}: @ {{ $messageGroup->getStart()->format('d.m.Y H:i:s');  }}</b>
        @foreach($messageGroup->getMessages() as $message)
            <p>{{ nl2br($message->content)  }}</p>
        @endforeach
    @endforeach

Access the conversations of a user

The trait allows you to use these functions:

	//All conversations that this user is a member of
	$user->conversations(); 
	
	//How many messages are unread
	$user->unreadMessagesCount();
	$user->hasUnreadMessages();
	
	//Get all unread conversations
	$user->unreadConversations();
	
	//Get all unread conversations inside all the unread conversations
	$user->unreadMessages();

Configuration

The configuration files are published into your app directory.

If you dont use the "users" table for storing your users you can rename it in hermes.usersTable
Change the tableprefix if you want to: hermes.tablePrefix

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