Pushpad - Web Push Notifications

Pushpad is a service for sending push notifications from your web app. It supports the Push API (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Edge) and APNs (Safari desktop). iOS support is coming in 2023.

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

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. If your application uses multiple projects, you can pass the project_id as a param to methods (e.g. notification.deliver_to user, project_id: 123).

Collecting user subscriptions to push notifications

You can subscribe the users to your notifications using the Javascript SDK, as described in the getting started guide.

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

Pushpad.signature_for current_user.id

Sending push notifications

notification = Pushpad::Notification.new({
  body: "Hello world!",
  title: "Website Name", # optional, defaults to your project name
  target_url: "https://example.com", # optional, defaults to your project website
  icon_url: "https://example.com/assets/icon.png", # optional, defaults to the project icon
  badge_url: "https://example.com/assets/badge.png", # optional, defaults to the project badge
  image_url: "https://example.com/assets/image.png", # optional, an image to display in the notification content
  ttl: 604800, # optional, drop the notification after this number of seconds if a device is offline
  require_interaction: true, # optional, prevent Chrome on desktop from automatically closing the notification after a few seconds
  silent: false, # optional, enable this option if you want a mute notification without any sound
  urgent: false, # optional, enable this option only for time-sensitive alerts (e.g. incoming phone call)
  custom_data: "123", # optional, a string that is passed as an argument to action button callbacks
  # optional, add some action buttons to the notification
  # see https://pushpad.xyz/docs/action_buttons
  actions: [
    {
      title: "My Button 1",
      target_url: "https://example.com/button-link", # optional
      icon: "https://example.com/assets/button-icon.png", # optional
      action: "myActionName" # optional
    }
  ],
  starred: true, # optional, bookmark the notification in the Pushpad dashboard (e.g. to highlight manual notifications)
  # optional, use this option only if you need to create scheduled notifications (max 5 days)
  # see https://pushpad.xyz/docs/schedule_notifications
  send_at: Time.utc(2016, 7, 25, 10, 9),
  # optional, add the notification to custom categories for stats aggregation
  # see https://pushpad.xyz/docs/monitoring
  custom_metrics: ['examples', 'another_metric'] # up to 3 metrics per notification
})

# deliver to a user
notification.deliver_to user # or user_id

# deliver to a group of users
notification.deliver_to users # or user_ids

# deliver to some users only if they have a given preference
# e.g. only "users" who have a interested in "events" will be reached
notification.deliver_to users, tags: ['events']

# deliver to segments
# e.g. any subscriber that has the tag "segment1" OR "segment2"
notification.broadcast tags: ['segment1', 'segment2']

# you can use boolean expressions 
# they must be in the disjunctive normal form (without parenthesis)
notification.broadcast tags: ['zip_code:28865 && !optout:local_events || friend_of:Organizer123']
notification.deliver_to users, tags: ['tag1 && tag2', 'tag3'] # equal to 'tag1 && tag2 || tag3'

# deliver to everyone
notification.broadcast

You can set the default values for most fields in the project settings. See also the docs for more information about notification fields.

If you try to send a notification to a user ID, but that user is not subscribed, that ID is simply ignored.

The methods above return an hash:

• "id" is the id of the notification on Pushpad
• "scheduled" is the estimated reach of the notification (i.e. the number of devices to which the notification will be sent, which can be different from the number of users, since a user may receive notifications on multiple devices)
• "uids" (deliver_to only) are the user IDs that will be actually reached by the notification because they are subscribed to your notifications. For example if you send a notification to ['uid1', 'uid2', 'uid3'], but only 'uid1' is subscribed, you will get ['uid1'] in response. Note that if a user has unsubscribed after the last notification sent to him, he may still be reported for one time as subscribed (this is due to the way the W3C Push API works).
• "send_at" is present only for scheduled notifications. The fields "scheduled" and "uids" are not available in this case.

The id and scheduled_count attribute are also stored on the notification object:

notification.deliver_to user

notification.id # => 1000
notification.scheduled_count # => 5

Getting push notification data

You can retrieve data for past notifications:

notification = Pushpad::Notification.find(42)

# get basic attributes
notification.id # => 42
notification.title # => "Foo Bar"
notification.body # => "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit."
notification.target_url # => "https://example.com"
notification.ttl # => 604800
notification.require_interaction # => false
notification.silent # => false
notification.urgent # => false
notification.icon_url # => "https://example.com/assets/icon.png"
notification.badge_url # => "https://example.com/assets/badge.png"

# `created_at` is a `Time` instance
notification.created_at.utc.to_s # => "2016-07-06 10:09:14 UTC"

# get statistics
notification.scheduled_count # => 1
notification.successfully_sent_count # => 4
notification.opened_count # => 2

Or for mutliple notifications of a project at once:

notifications = Pushpad::Notification.find_all(project_id: 5)

# same attributes as for single notification in example above
notifications[0].id # => 42
notifications[0].title # => "Foo Bar"

If Pushpad.project_id is defined, the project_id option can be omitted.

The REST API paginates the result set. You can pass a page parameter to get the full list in multiple requests.

notifications = Pushpad::Notification.find_all(project_id: 5, page: 2)

Getting subscription count

You can retrieve the number of subscriptions for a given project, optionally filtered by tags or uids:

Pushpad::Subscription.count(project_id: 5) # => 100
Pushpad::Subscription.count(project_id: 5, uids: ['user1']) # => 2
Pushpad::Subscription.count(project_id: 5, tags: ['sports']) # => 10
Pushpad::Subscription.count(project_id: 5, tags: 'sports && travel') # => 5
Pushpad::Subscription.count(project_id: 5, uids: ['user1'], tags: 'sports && travel') # => 1

If Pushpad.project_id is defined, the project_id option can be omitted.

License

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