A lightweight Android and iOS push notification server that reads from a simple Redis API and delivers notifications via GCM and APN.
rpush yodel:subscribe '{"user_id":5, "token":"sample", "platform":"ios"}'
rpush yodel:unsubscribe '{"user_id":5, "token":"sample", "platform":"ios"}'
rpush yodel:notify '{"user_id":5, "message":"This is a test", "payload": {"sample": "payload"}}'
Yodel is meant to run as an independent Node service on Node 0.10.x and up to Node 5.x. It requires connections to Redis and MySQL servers.
Of the 7 supported config files, only 1 is required. All have corresponding sample files in the config directory.
- knexfile.js (required)
- redis.json (optional)
- redis_events.json (optional)
- apn.json (optional)
- gcm.json (optional)
- sentry.json (optional)
- ping.json (optional)
When writing apn.json, keep in mind that all of the options in that file are passed directly to the node-apn package. You can see a list of supported options in their documentation.
Ensure that you have MySQL and Redis running, and that you're MySQL server has a database matching you're knexfile. At that point, install npm packages and run the DB migration:
npm install
tasks/migrate
You should be ready to start Yodel now. At the most basic level, that can be accomplished with the following command.
node app.js
Yodel does also support the following options:
-h, --help output usage information
-e, --environment <env> Node Environment (defaults to development)
-w, --workers <n> Number of workers (defaults to number of CPUs)
Yodel maintains an updated notification key for each user's Android devices. Once provided to the Android client, the notification key can be used to implement GCM upstream messaging. For more information on user notifications, check out the official docs and this handy guide.
Add option "push_notification_key":true to have Yodel send a key-bearing push notification to the subscribed device. This notification will provide the notification_key as a data element for use on the client.
rpush yodel:subscribe '{
"user_id":5,
"token":"sample",
"platform":"android",
"push_notification_key":true
}'
Add option "include_notification_key":true to include the notification_key data element in the resulting push notification. This is particularly useful when implementing cross-device notification dismissal.
rpush yodel:notify '{
"user_id":5,
"message":"This is a test",
"payload": {"sample": "payload"},
"include_notification_key":true
}'
Yodel automatically takes advantage of APN's Feedback Service and unsubscribes devices who have not re-registered or updated since your last failed notification to the device. This is discussed in the APN documentation here.
By default, Yodel will query the service once every 12 hours. You can change this by setting a new interval in config/apn.json as seconds. For example, to query for feedback every hour - "interval": 3600.
Yodel includes a basic import script for Urban Airship. It relies on your aliases being integers. If you need to parse a different alias format, it should be relatively easy to modify.
tasks/import_from_urban_airship -k ua_app_key -m ua_master_secret -e development
If a valid ping config is present for the current environment, Yodel will ping the run and complete URLs at the specified frequency. This can be helpful to ensure that Yodel is running and connected to the necessary databases.
If a redis_events config is present for the current environment, Yodel will publish
events to the yodel:events key. Those will be JSON strings in the following format:
{
"user_id": 1,
"action": "create_device|update_device|delete_device|notify",
"platform": "android|ios",
"successful": true|false
}
We've created a project to aggregate and display data from Yodel. Yodel Stats reads data
from yodel:events, aggregates it in MySQL, and displays the data with a simple Express
app. For more information, visit the Yodel Stats repository.