Pushpad: real push notifications for websites

Add native push notifications to your web app using Pushpad.

Features:

  • notifications are delivered even when the user is not on your website
  • users don't need to install any app or plugin
  • you can target specific users or send bulk notifications

Currently push notifications work on the following browsers:

  • Chrome (Desktop and Android)
  • Firefox (44+)
  • Safari

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'pushpad'

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install pushpad

Getting started

First you need to sign up to Pushpad and create a project there.

Then set your authentication credentials:

Pushpad.auth_token = '5374d7dfeffa2eb49965624ba7596a09'
Pushpad.project_id = 123 # set it here or pass it as a param to methods later

auth_token can be found in the user account settings. project_id can be found in the project settings on Pushpad. A project is a list of subscriptions. You can set it globally or pass it as a param to methods if your app uses multiple lists (e.g. Pushpad.path_for current_user, project_id: 123, notification.deliver_to user, project_id: 123).

Collecting user subscriptions

Custom API

Read the docs.

If you need to generate the HMAC signature for the uid you can use this helper:

Pushpad.signature_for current_user.id

Simple API

Let users subscribe to your push notifications: 

<a href="<%= Pushpad.path %>">Subscribe anonymous to push notifications</a>

<a href="<%= Pushpad.path_for current_user # or current_user_id %>">Subscribe current user to push notifications</a>

current_user is the user currently logged in on your website.

When a user clicks the link is sent to Pushpad, automatically asked to receive push notifications and redirected back to your website.

Sending notifications

After you have collected the user subscriptions you can send them push notifications:

notification = Pushpad::Notification.new({
  body: "Hello world!",
  title: "Website Name", # optional, defaults to your project name
  target_url: "http://example.com" # optional, defaults to your project website
})

notification.deliver_to user # or user_id
notification.deliver_to users # or user_ids
notification.broadcast # deliver to everyone
# => {"scheduled": 12}

If no user with that id has subscribed to push notifications, that id is simply ignored.

The methods above return an hash: res["scheduled"] contains the number of notifications that will be sent. For example if you call notification.deliver_to user but the user has never subscribed to push notifications the result will be {"scheduled": 0}.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.