Send notifications with PHP

Courier is one API for every channel your product notifies through: email, SMS, push, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and an in-app inbox. You send once; Courier renders the template, picks the channel from the user’s preferences and your routing, and delivers through the providers you already use. This guide gets a PHP app from zero to a delivered notification, then adds channel routing and a multi-step journey. About five minutes. What you need

A Courier account. Start free.
A Test API key from Settings → API Keys. Set it as COURIER_API_KEY.
PHP 8.1 or later, and Composer.
A user in Courier with an email or phone number. Step 2 creates one through the API.

Building with an AI agent? Install the Courier skill and your agent knows the API, the channels, and the patterns on this page.

npx skills add trycourier/courier-skills

Setup for Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex, plus the hosted MCP server, is in Build with AI.

1. Install the SDK

composer require trycourier/courier

The SDK is a typed client for the whole API, built on named parameters and PSR-18. It finds whatever HTTP client your project already uses through php-http/discovery, so add guzzlehttp/guzzle if you do not have one. The client reads COURIER_API_KEY from the environment, so there is nothing to configure for the first send.

2. Create a user

Courier is built around users, not addresses. A user profile holds the email, phone number, push tokens, and chat handles for one person, plus their notification preferences. Once it exists, every send names the user and Courier works out where to reach them. Your code never handles a contact detail again.

<?php

use Courier\Client;

$courier = new Client();

$courier->profiles->create(
    'user_123',
    profile: ['email' => 'ada@example.com', 'phone_number' => '+15555550123'],
);

create merges into the profile and leaves keys you omit untouched. Use $courier->profiles->replace() when you want the request body to become the whole profile.

3. Send a notification

A send names a template and a user, and passes the data specific to this event. The template lives in Design Studio, where it holds the content for every channel and the routing rules, so a copy change or a new channel never needs a deploy. The idempotency key means a retried request returns the original response instead of sending twice.

$response = $courier->send->message(
    message: [
        'template' => 'order-confirmation',
        'to' => ['userID' => 'user_123'],
        'data' => ['order_id' => 'ORD-456', 'total' => '$99.99'],
    ],
    idempotencyKey: 'order-confirmed-ORD-456',
);

$requestId = $response->requestID;

The call returns a request ID. Open Message Logs and you will see the request, the channel Courier chose, the provider it used, and the delivery status as it updates.

4. Route across channels

Routing normally lives in the template, but a send can override it when the code knows something the template does not. single tries channels in order and stops at the first that delivers; all sends on every listed channel. The user’s preferences still apply on top, so a user who has opted out of SMS gets the email, and a user with no phone number on file does too.

$courier->send->message(
    message: [
        'template' => 'password-reset',
        'to' => ['userID' => 'user_123'],
        'routing' => ['method' => 'single', 'channels' => ['sms', 'email']],
        'data' => ['reset_url' => 'https://app.example.com/reset/abc'],
    ],
);

5. Start a journey

Some notifications are sequences: a welcome email now, a reminder tomorrow if setup is not finished, a different path for team plans. A journey is that sequence built in a visual editor as steps that send, wait, branch on user data, or digest a burst of events into one message. You publish it once, and your code only has to start it. When the sequence changes, the editor changes; the invoke call does not.

$invoked = $courier->journeys->invoke(
    'new-signup-onboarding',
    data: ['plan' => 'team'],
    userID: 'user_123',
);

$run = $courier->journeys->runs->retrieve($invoked->runID);
$run->run->status; // PROCESSING, WAITING, PROCESSED, CANCELED, ERROR, THROTTLED, NOT PROCESSED

Runs execute asynchronously, so invoke returns before any message is sent. Runs are retained for 95 days.

Confirm delivery

A request fans out to one message per recipient and channel, and each message moves through its own lifecycle: enqueued, sent to the provider, delivered, opened, clicked. Look a message up by ID to read where it is.

$message = $courier->messages->retrieve($messageId);

$message->status; // ENQUEUED, SENT, DELIVERED, OPENED, CLICKED, UNDELIVERABLE

For production, subscribe to an outbound webhook instead of polling: Courier posts each status change to your endpoint as it happens.

Next steps

Working example: this guide as a runnable project.
Add an in-app inbox with the React or web component SDK.
Let users set preferences.
Send API reference: every field.
PHP SDK reference.

Quickstarts

Platform

Developer Tools

Help

Send notifications with PHP

1. Install the SDK

2. Create a user

3. Send a notification

4. Route across channels

5. Start a journey

Confirm delivery

Next steps

​1. Install the SDK

​2. Create a user

​3. Send a notification

​4. Route across channels

​5. Start a journey

​Confirm delivery

​Next steps

1. Install the SDK

2. Create a user

3. Send a notification

4. Route across channels

5. Start a journey

Confirm delivery

Next steps