In this episode, we're diving into how to join channels and listen to real-time events using Laravel Echo and Alpine.js. We'll be working in our dashboard and show you how you can listen for events from anywhere in your app. Whether you're using pure JavaScript, Alpine, or Livewire (which we'll cover more in other courses), the ideas are similar.
We start by bringing up the browser console to see the events we're broadcasting. Then, we jump into the dashboard template and use the globally available Echo
instance to connect to our chat
channel. Don't worry if you're not too familiar with Alpine.js! We're really just using it as a way to run some simple JavaScript when the component initializes.
Once connected, we confirm in the console that we've subscribed to the channel. Since it's a public channel, we don't need to worry about authentication here. Next up, we listen for the example
event on this channel, and whenever it comes through, we just log out the event data for now.
Finally, we trigger the broadcast from our real-time route to see it all in action. You’ll see the event data appear in the console (currently empty because the event doesn't have any payload yet). So, up next, we'll start adding actual data to our events to make things more interesting!