Live Toast

Live Toast is a drop-in replacement for the flash system in Phoenix/LiveView.

Features

📄 Stackable toast messages: The flash system limits you to one flash per type. No longer!
📸 Replaces your flash messages: One drop in component to continue to render your flash messages in the same style as the newer toast system.
💅 Beautiful by design: Based on the look of the wonderful Sonner library from React.
⚙️ Highly configurable: Looks good out of the box, but can be changed in pretty much any way you want.
🌍 Simple asset delivery: LiveToast simply ships Tailwind classes and lets your project bundle them up. No CSS drop-in required.

Installation

Add live_toast to your list of dependencies in the mix.exs of your Phoenix application:

def deps do
  [
    {:live_toast, "~> 0.6.4"}
  ]
end

Next open up your app.js and import/setup the hook (Note that if you bundle through some external bundler, you may need to import from ../deps/live_toast):

import { createLiveToastHook } from 'live_toast'

let liveSocket = new LiveSocket('/live', Socket, {
  hooks: {
    LiveToast: createLiveToastHook()
  }
})

Then, add '../deps/live_toast/lib/**/*.*ex' to your list of paths Tailwind will look for class names, in your tailwind.config.js:

// assets/tailwind.config.js

module.exports = {
  content: [
    './js/**/*.js',
    '../lib/your_app_web.ex',
    '../lib/your_app_web/**/*.*ex',
    '../deps/live_toast/lib/**/*.*ex',
  ]
}

Your particular file will look different but all you need to do is make sure the last line is there.

Note for Umbrella Apps: If you're using an umbrella application, your paths above may look different. You'll probably have an extra folder in there, so the line you need to add would be more like "../../../deps/live_toast/lib/**/*.*ex"

Finally, replace your <.flash_group /> component with the new <LiveToast.toast_group />. It's most likely in your app.html.heex:

<!-- Remove this! -->
<.flash_group flash={@flash} />

<!-- And replace it with this: -->
<LiveToast.toast_group flash={@flash} connected={assigns[:socket] != nil} />

<%= @inner_content %>

Note: As far as I can tell in my testing, this usage of assigns in the layout has no negative impact on change tracking.

And you're done! Note that it's very important to set connected based on whether we're in a LiveView or not. This controls toast/flash display on non-LiveView pages.

Usage

LiveToast will hijack the usual display of your flash messages, so they will continue to work as normal. You can continue to use flashes as normal, if you want to.

However, one of the reasons to not use flash messages, is the Phoenix flash system only allows one message for each kind of flash. The toast pattern, alternatively, generally allows for multiple messages displayed to the user at at time.

From a LiveView, you can now use send_toast:

Note: Please reference the Configuration section below for the available options.

defmodule YourApp.SomeLiveView do
  def handle_event("submit", _payload, socket) do
    options = [
      title: "Status"
    ]

    # you do some thing with the payload, then you want to show a toast, so:
    LiveToast.send_toast(:info, "Upload successful.", options)

    {:noreply, socket}
  end
end

Note: LiveToast is the top-level module, so there's no need to alias or import anything.

Or you can use the helper function, put_toast, similar to how you may use put_flash:

defmodule YourApp.SomeLiveView do
  def handle_event("submit", _payload, socket) do
    socket = socket
    |> put_toast(:info, "Upload successful.")

    {:noreply, socket}
  end
end

put_toast can take a Phoenix.LiveView.Socket or a Plug.Conn, so you can use the same thing in your live and non-live pages.

defmodule YourApp.SomeController do
  def create(conn, _params) do
    conn
    |> put_toast(:info, "Upload successful.")
    |> render(:whatever)
  end
end

Configuration

Setting the corner

You can change which corner the toasts are anchored to by passing the corner setting to toast_group, one of either :top_left, :top_right, :bottom_left, :bottom_right. The default is :bottom_right.

<LiveToast.toast_group flash={@flash} connected={assigns[:socket] != nil} corner={:top_right} />

Function Options

send_toast takes a number of arguments to control it's behavior. They are currently:

kind: The 'level' of this toast. The component function can receive this and modify behavior based on severity. the toast_class_fn also receives it, and it can be used there to modify styles, for example, making :info toasts green and :error toasts red.
body: The primary text of the message.
title: The optional title of the toast displayed at the top.
icon: An optional function component that renders next to the title. You can use this with the default toast to display an icon.
action: An optional function component that renders to the side. You can use this with the default toast to display an action, like a button.
component: Use this to totally override rendering of the toast. This is expected to be a function component that will receive all of the above options. See this part of the demo as an example.

Note that if you use more than just :info and :error in your codebase for flashes, you can augment LiveToast using some of the methods below to support that.

Custom Classes

You can define a custom toast class function, like so:

defmodule MyModule do
  def toast_class_fn(assigns) do
    [
      # base classes
      "group/toast z-100 pointer-events-auto relative w-full items-center justify-between origin-center overflow-hidden rounded-lg p-4 shadow-lg border col-start-1 col-end-1 row-start-1 row-end-2",
      # start hidden if javascript is enabled
      "[@media(scripting:enabled)]:opacity-0 [@media(scripting:enabled){[data-phx-main]_&}]:opacity-100",
      # used to hide the disconnected flashes
      if(assigns[:rest][:hidden] == true, do: "hidden", else: "flex"),
      # override styles per severity
      assigns[:kind] == :info && "bg-white text-black",
      assigns[:kind] == :error && "!text-red-700 !bg-red-100 border-red-200"
    ]
  end
end

And then use it to override the default styles:

<LiveToast.toast_group flash={@flash} connected={assigns[:socket] != nil} toast_class_fn={&MyModule.toast_class_fn/1} />

If you need to change the classes of the container, there is a similar function parameter called group_class_fn. Reference the documentation and apply the override just as you would toast_class_fn/1 shown above.

Custom Severity Levels

New Phoenix projects use :info and :error as the default severity levels for flash messages, so this is likely what you're already using. If you need to add an additional severity level, like :warning, you can pass a list of these values to the kind attribute:

<LiveToast.toast_group
  flash={@flash}
  connected={assigns[:socket] != nil}
  kinds={[:info, :error, :warning]}
  toast_class_fn={&custom_toast_class_fn/1}
/>

If this value is not set, it defaults to [:info, :error].

Setting kind will allow these new severity levels to be displayed, but it won't change how they look. To do that, you need to override toast_class_fn/1. For example:

# Note that this is just the default with one line added to handle the new `:warning` level.
def custom_toast_class_fn(assigns) do
  [
    # base classes
    "bg-white group/toast z-100 pointer-events-auto relative w-full items-center justify-between origin-center overflow-hidden rounded-lg p-4 shadow-lg border col-start-1 col-end-1 row-start-1 row-end-2",
    # start hidden if javascript is enabled
    "[@media(scripting:enabled)]:opacity-0 [@media(scripting:enabled){[data-phx-main]_&}]:opacity-100",
    # used to hide the disconnected flashes
    if(assigns[:rest][:hidden] == true, do: "hidden", else: "flex"),
    # override styles per severity
    assigns[:kind] == :info && "text-black",
    assigns[:kind] == :error && "!text-red-700 !bg-red-100 border-red-200",
    assigns[:kind] == :warning && "!text-amber-700 !bg-amber-100 border-amber-200"
  ]
end

Then just make sure you've passed it to the live_group component as seen above.

JavaScript Options

You can also change some options about the LiveView hook when it is initialized. Such as:

import { createLiveToastHook } from 'live_toast'

// the duration for each toast to stay on screen in ms
const duration = 4000

// how many toasts to show on screen at once
const maxItems = 3

const liveToastHook = createLiveToastHook(duration, maxItems)

let liveSocket = new LiveSocket('/live', Socket, {
  hooks: { LiveToast: liveToastHook }
})

Roadmap

Some of the stuff still to work on:

srcrip / live_toast