Laravel User Presence

This package allows you to track user presence in your Laravel application. It provides a simple way to determine if a user is online, offline, or idle. Useful for chat apps, dashboards, real-time features, and more.

Installation

composer require evanschleret/laravel-user-presence

Optionally, publish the config file:

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="EvanSchleret\LaravelUserPresence\Providers\LaravelUserPresenceServiceProvider"

Requirements

• Laravel 10 or 11
• PHP >= 8.2
• A last_seen_at column on your users table (or whichever model you attach presence to)

$table->timestamp('last_seen_at')->nullable();

You could also publish the migration file to create this column:

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="EvanSchleret\LaravelUserPresence\Providers\LaravelUserPresenceServiceProvider" --tag="migrations"

Then run the migration:

php artisan migrate

Usage

Trait Add the trait to your User model:

use EvanSchleret\LaravelUserPresence\Traits\HasUserPresence;

class User extends Authenticatable
{
    use HasUserPresence;
}

Middleware

Add the UpdateLastSeen middleware to your web or api group to update presence on each request:

// app/Http/Kernel.php
protected $middlewareGroups = [
    'web' => [
        // ...
        \EvanSchleret\LaravelUserPresence\Http\Middleware\UpdateLastSeen::class,
    ],
];

Attributes available

After setup, the following attributes will be available on the user model:

$user->is_online       // true if active in the last 2 minutes
$user->is_offline      // inverse of is_online
$user->is_idle         // true if inactive for 2–10 minutes
$user->last_seen_ago   // "3 minutes ago", "never", etc.
$user->presence_status // 'online', 'away', or 'offline'

Configuration

You can customize time thresholds in the published config file:

// config/user-presence.php
return [
    'online_threshold' => 300,  // in seconds
    'idle_threshold' => 600,     // in seconds
    'guard' => 'web', // or 'api' / 'sanctum' if using API authentication
];

Events

The package dispatches these events when presence changes:

UserWentOnline
UserWentOffline
UserWentIdle

Roadmap

• Tests
• Redis driver for real-time broadcast presence
• Eloquent observer-based updates

Contributing

I'm always open to contributions! Feel free to submit issues or pull requests on GitHub.

License

This package is open-sourced software licensed under the MIT license.