Slack notification when not configured (example local env)

[abdel-aouby]

Hello, I have a situation and I would like to ask the community to see if it's an issue specific to my project or if it's by design.

If i have a notification class with 2 methods

toMail
toSlack

and via(object $notifiable) method returns ['mail', 'slack']

This works fine and well tested, when i set the env config to good values

SLACK_BOT_USER_OAUTH_TOKEN=something
SLACK_BOT_USER_DEFAULT_CHANNEL=something

but let's say i don't want to keep sending the slack notification when i'm on DEV env, so i removed the config values form my .env file in local machine (expecting to receive only the mails and the slack will be ignored)
but not, the notification class is always throwing an error

[2025-07-22 13:17:30] local.ERROR: Slack notification channel is not set. {"exception":"[object] (LogicException(code: 0): Slack notification channel is not set. at /var/www/html/vendor/laravel/slack-notification-channel/src/Slack/SlackChannel.php:44)

is this by desing? or it needs somehow to be managed better, because many projects don't need to send the slack notifications other than production env?

Yes it does make sense to fail if slack if not configured but i think we could add some global flag that will not send slack notification under some condition (not prod env ?)
similar to the ones we have for model Model::preventSilentlyDiscardingAttributes($this->app->isLocal());

I already wrote a small service class in my project that will check if slack is configured before adding it to via()
but i would like to hear your idea about it. and if there is not a build in laravel functionality that manage this

[code-with-sayad-babu-dev]

Hi 👋

Yes, this is a common scenario in development environments. Since the SlackChannel throws a LogicException when not configured, the Laravel Notification system expects everything listed in via() to be ready.

You're doing the right thing by checking if Slack is configured before adding it to the via() array.

One way to handle it globally could be using a base notification class like this:

public function via($notifiable)
{
    $via = ['mail'];

    if (
        app()->environment('production') &&
        config('services.slack.token') &&
        config('services.slack.channel')
    ) {
        $via[] = 'slack';
    }

    return $via;
}



Or even better, create a helper function like slackIsConfigured() and reuse that logic across multiple notifications.

Laravel doesn't yet provide built-in filtering like preventSilentlyDiscardingAttributes() for notifications, so your approach is reasonable.

Would be great if Laravel supported a native way to skip unconfigured channels based on environment flags.

Thanks for raising this!

[abdel-aouby]

Yes, I wanted only to make sure it is not available. Thank you for the clarification.

I'm attaching here my current solution. (not perfect, but works :) its purpose) can sanitize more channels than just slack if you add the options to canSend() method

final class NotificationChannelsService
{
    /**
     * @param  array<string>  $via
     * @return array<string>
     */
    public function sanitizeChannels(array $via): array
    {
        return array_filter($via, fn (string $channel) => $this->canSend($channel));
    }

    private function canSend(string $channel): bool
    {
        return match ($channel) {
            'slack' => $this->shouldSendToSlack(),
            default => true,
        };
    }

    private function shouldSendToSlack(): bool
    {
        return app()->isProduction() &&
            config('services.slack.notifications.bot_user_oauth_token') &&
            config('services.slack.notifications.channel');
    }
}

can be used like that

public function via(object $notifiable): array
    {
        return app(NotificationChannelsService::class)->sanitizeChannels(['slack', 'mail']);
    }