In this episode, we dive into how presence channels work in Laravel. Instead of just returning true
or false
when authorizing access to a channel (which you'd typically do with private channels), presence channels require you to return data about the user. This data is what the WebSocket server holds onto to track who is actually present in the channel.
We walk through the process of setting up a presence channel for a "room"—giving each channel a unique name using the room's ID. Rather than just a simple authorization, we return an array of user details (like the user's ID and name), which makes it easier to manage the list of users in the frontend. We also mention a shortcut Laravel offers for selecting only certain fields from your models.
Next, we connect to our presence channel using JavaScript (specifically with Alpine.js and Laravel Echo) and see this in action by tracking join/leaving events. The server returns various member events, updating us with who enters or exits the room. The final goal here is to use these events to maintain and update a live list of active users in the frontend—including marking who just arrived and who just left.
In the next part, we'll actually implement that frontend user list so you can see your presence channel data updating in real-time!