Getting Started

Read the upgrade path before you install

v2.0.0 is a major release that moves the package onto SMSPoh API v3. If you already ship v1, read UPGRADE.md first — the config location, the credential shape, and the sender method all changed. If you're starting fresh, the steps below are the current (v2) shape.

Get SMSPoh credentials — v3 uses a key + secret pair, not the single API token v1 used. Grab both from the dashboard.
Register/whitelist your sender name as before. In Myanmar, sender IDs are approved per account; an unapproved from is still the most common cause of a "successful" install that never delivers.
Check the Composer constraint. The release notes call out Laravel 13.x compatibility — confirm the package's illuminate/support range still covers the Laravel version you're pinned to before bumping the major.

Install and configure

composer require laravel-notification-channels/smspoh

The provider is auto-discovered. In v2 the config block lives in config/services.php, not a published config/smspoh.php:

// config/services.php
'smspoh' => [
    'key'    => env('SMSPOH_KEY'),
    'secret' => env('SMSPOH_SECRET'),
    'from'   => env('SMSPOH_FROM'),
],

SMSPOH_KEY=your-api-key
SMSPOH_SECRET=your-api-secret
SMSPOH_FROM=YourApprovedSender

If you publish the package config and it drops files into config/, be careful it doesn't overwrite your services.php — merge by hand instead. And clear cached config after any of this, or you'll authenticate with stale/empty credentials.

Where to look first (the package is small — read it, don't guess)

src/SmspohChannel.php — now hitting the v3 endpoint; check what status codes and body-level errors throw, and how the new payload fields (schedule, encryption, unicode, webhook, reference) are serialized.
src/SmspohMessage.php — the fluent builder. v2 adds scheduledAt(), encrypt(), encryptKey(), unicode(), deliveryReceiptUrl(), clientReference(), and renames sender() → from().
src/SmspohServiceProvider.php — confirms exactly which config key it reads (services.smspoh) and under what names.
UPGRADE.md — short, but the only authoritative list of what breaks.

First use case: an OTP notification

namespace App\Notifications;

use Illuminate\Bus\Queueable;
use Illuminate\Contracts\Queue\ShouldQueue;
use Illuminate\Notifications\Notification;
use NotificationChannels\Smspoh\SmspohChannel;
use NotificationChannels\Smspoh\SmspohMessage;

class SendOtp extends Notification implements ShouldQueue
{
    use Queueable;

    public function __construct(public string $code) {}

    public function via($notifiable): array
    {
        return [SmspohChannel::class];
    }

    public function toSmspoh($notifiable): SmspohMessage
    {
        return SmspohMessage::create()
            ->to($notifiable->phone)
            ->content("Your verification code is {$this->code}. It expires in 5 minutes.")
            ->unicode(); // required if the copy includes Burmese script
    }
}

Dispatch with $user->notify(new SendOtp('482913'));.

Implementation Patterns

Route the phone number on the model, not in every notification

// app/Models/User.php
public function routeNotificationForSmspoh($notification)
{
    return $this->phone; // E.164: +959xxxxxxxxx
}

Then toSmspoh() can omit ->to() entirely, and swapping numbers or adding a second contact is a model change, not a notification change. Use explicit ->to() only for one-off messages.

On-demand notifications for non-models (invites, magic links, unverified leads)

Notification::route('smspoh', '+959771234567')
    ->notify(new SendOtp($code));

If that route key doesn't resolve for your version, the deterministic escape hatch is ->to($phone) on the message, which bypasses notifiable routing. Wrap it in a helper so the whole app uses one code path.

Make it queued and rate-limited by default

SMS is a side effect, not part of the request. Always implements ShouldQueue, and throttle per user:

public function middleware($notifiable)
{
    return [(new ThrottleRequests('sms:' . $notifiable->id, 3, 1))];
}

This stops an OTP-resend button, a retry storm, or a webhook replay from draining credits and getting your sender blocked.

Scheduling — new in v2, and the most useful addition

scheduledAt('Y-m-d H:i:s') lets you hand reminders to SMSPoh instead of holding a queue job open for hours or days:

return SmspohMessage::create()
    ->content('Your appointment is tomorrow at 09:00.')
    ->scheduledAt($appointment->starts_at->copy()->subDay()->utc()->format('Y-m-d H:i:s'));

This decouples you from delay() on a queue job — which is exactly what you want for appointment reminders, trial-expiry nudges, and payment due dates, since it survives a queue restart and doesn't consume a delayed-job slot.

Encryption for OTP and sensitive alerts — new in v2

return SmspohMessage::create()
    ->content($text)
    ->encrypt()
    ->encryptKey(config('services.smspoh.encrypt_key'));

Treat the encryption key as a real secret: keep it in .env/a secret manager, never in the message class. Before you ship this for OTP, verify the recipient experience end to end (how the message is decrypted/unlocked on the handset) — an encrypted OTP nobody can read is worse than a plaintext one, and it's the kind of thing you only find out from a real device, not from a passing test.

Delivery receipts via webhook — new in v2

deliveryReceiptUrl($url) lets you set a per-message callback, so you finally get delivery confirmation instead of guessing from a 200:

return SmspohMessage::create()
    ->content($text)
    ->clientReference($notificationId)
    ->deliveryReceiptUrl(route('webhooks.smspoh'));

Route that to a public, verified endpoint. Verify the request (signature/shared secret), keep the handler idempotent — providers retry callbacks — acknowledge fast with a 200, and do the DB write in a queued job. Use clientReference() to correlate the callback back to your notification/order row; it's the cleanest join key you'll get.

Use clientReference() as your idempotency handle

Give every send a stable reference (notification UUID, order id, "{$template}:{$user->id}"). Combined with a short Cache::lock(), it's how you stop a queue retry from producing a second billable SMS, and it gives support a searchable key on the provider side. Same idea as v1, but now first-class.

Localize and template centrally

Burmese copy is long; keep it in lang/my/notifications.php and render in toSmspoh(). This keeps the script handling and segment length in one place — and now makes it trivial to decide per template whether ->unicode() is required.

Multi-tenant / per-purpose senders

Override the sender on the message when different brands share an account — note the method rename:

return SmspohMessage::create()
    ->content($text)
    ->from($tenant->sms_from ?? config('services.smspoh.from'));

->sender() is deprecated in v2. Sweep your codebase for it now rather than waiting for it to disappear in v3.

Testing — two levels

// Feature tests: never hit the network
Notification::fake();
$user->notify(new SendOtp('123456'));
Notification::assertSentTo($user, SendOtp::class, function ($n, $channels) use ($user) {
    return in_array(SmspohChannel::class, $channels)
        && str_contains($n->toSmspoh($user)->content, '123456');
});

// Channel unit tests: Http::fake() the v3 endpoint and assert the payload,
// including the new fields — scheduled_at, encrypted, unicode,
// delivery_receipt_url, client_reference. Those are the ones most likely
// to regress silently when you bump the package.

Observability

Listen to NotificationSent / NotificationFailed, filter channel === 'smspoh', and log the notification class plus notifiable id. Store the provider message id and your clientReference on your own table — with v2's delivery receipts you can now actually close the loop from queued → sent → delivered.

Isolate the dependency

Wrap SmspohChannel::class behind App\Notifications\Channels\SmsChannel or a base notification class. A package that shipped a breaking major with a config-path move and a method rename is exactly the case for this — a future v3 becomes one file's work.

Fallback channel

public function via($notifiable): array
{
    return $notifiable->phone ? [SmspohChannel::class] : ['mail'];
}

Gotchas and Tips

The upgrade is not a token rename. Three things break at once: config moved to config/services.php, token split into key + secret, and sender became from. Miss any one and you get a 401 or a rejected sender that looks like a network problem. Diff your services.php against the release notes, not against a blog post.
Stale cached config is the classic post-upgrade failure. config:cache freezes old keys. After upgrading, run php artisan config:clear and then config:cache again, and confirm config('services.smspoh.key') is populated — never read env('SMSPOH_KEY') from application code, it returns null in production.
env() names changed too. If .env still has SMSPOH_TOKEN, the new keys resolve empty and you'll chase a phantom auth error. Rename the env vars in the same commit as the Composer bump.
Unicode is now explicit. v2 exposes ->unicode(). If your templates contain Burmese script and you don't set it, expect garbled text or a provider-side rejection depending on how the gateway sniffs encoding. Set it deliberately per template, and keep in mind UCS-2 segments are ~70 characters versus 160 for GSM-7 — a "short" Burmese notification can bill as two or three segments. Never truncate mid-codepoint.
scheduledAt() takes 'Y-m-d H:i:s', which carries no timezone. It's interpreted in whatever zone the provider assumes. Convert explicitly from your stored UTC timestamps (->utc()->format(...)) and test one scheduled send against the real API before trusting reminders at scale — an off-by-hours reminder is a support ticket per user.
Encryption key lifecycle. Rotating encryptKey() may make previously queued-but-unsent messages undecryptable. Don't rotate while a backlog of scheduled encrypted messages is in flight, and never log the key or the plaintext alongside the request.
Delivery-receipt endpoints are public and retried. Verify authenticity, make the handler idempotent (upsert on the provider message id / your clientReference), and return 200 fast. Also confirm the URL is reachable from the internet — a route() pointing at localhost will silently never fire, and you'll conclude receipts are broken.
HTTP 200 still doesn't mean delivered. Gateways return 200 with a body-level failure status. Read SmspohChannel in v2 to see whether it throws on logical errors; if it doesn't, check the response yourself and throw, so the queue retries and NotificationFailed fires. Delivery receipts reduce but don't remove this need.
Phone normalization. SMSPoh expects international format. Normalize 09xxxxxxxxx → +959xxxxxxxxx once (model mutator or a libphonenumber cast) and validate before dispatch. A malformed number is a failed send you paid for.
Don't log the credentials. With key and secret now in play there are two headers/secrets to redact. Http::fake() tests are safe; dump() in a controller is not.
Set a timeout. Add a 5–10s HTTP timeout in config. A hanging gateway call stalls queue workers and cascades into backlog.
Guard missing numbers. If routeNotificationForSmspoh() returns null and the message has no ->to(), the channel throws. Filter in via() rather than catching after the fact.
Deduplication is still yours. clientReference() gives you a correlation key, not a guarantee. Keep the Cache::lock("sms:{$user->id}:{$template}", 30) guard around OTP and payment alerts.
Verify method names against src/ after the bump. Deprecated-but-working methods (sender()) hide the problem until removal. Grep for sender( and SMSPOH_TOKEN and smspoh.php as an upgrade checklist.
Pin the version exactly. A single-maintainer package shipping a breaking major with new payload fields means the hardening is on you. Use an exact constraint, read the src/ diff and UPGRADE.md before bumping, and re-run your Http::fake() payload assertions — those will catch a silently changed field name faster than staging will.
Extension points. Subclass SmspohMessage to add helpers (e.g. ->template()), and point the endpoint at a sandbox via config. For retries with backoff or provider failover, write a decorator channel — don't patch vendor/.

Smspoh Laravel Package

Getting Started

Implementation Patterns

Gotchas and Tips