Pushpad - Web Push Notifications

Pushpad is a service for sending push notifications from websites and web apps. It uses the Push API, which is a standard supported by all major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Edge, Safari).

The notifications are delivered in real time even when the users are not on your website and you can target specific users or send bulk notifications.

Installation

Composer

You can install the bindings via Composer. Run the following command:

composer require pushpad/pushpad-php

To use the bindings, use Composer's autoload:

require_once('vendor/autoload.php');

Manual Installation

Download the latest version of this library:

$ git clone https://github.com/pushpad/pushpad-php.git

Then add this line to your application:

require_once('path/to/pushpad-php/init.php');

Getting started

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

Then set your authentication credentials:

Pushpad\Pushpad::$auth_token = '5374d7dfeffa2eb49965624ba7596a09';
Pushpad\Pushpad::$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_id, array('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\Pushpad::signature_for($current_user_id);

Sending push notifications

$notification = new Pushpad\Notification(array(
  # required, the main content of the notification
  'body' => "Hello world!",

  # optional, the title of the notification (defaults to your project name)
  'title' => "Website Name",

  # optional, open this link on notification click (defaults to your project website)
  'target_url' => "https://example.com",

  # optional, the icon of the notification (defaults to the project icon)
  'icon_url' => "https://example.com/assets/icon.png",

  # optional, the small icon displayed in the status bar (defaults to the project badge)
  'badge_url' => "https://example.com/assets/badge.png",

  # optional, an image to display in the notification content
  # see https://pushpad.xyz/docs/sending_images
  'image_url' => "https://example.com/assets/image.png",

  # optional, drop the notification after this number of seconds if a device is offline
  'ttl' => 604800,

  # optional, prevent Chrome on desktop from automatically closing the notification after a few seconds
  'require_interaction' => true,

  # optional, enable this option if you want a mute notification without any sound
  'silent' => false,

  # optional, enable this option only for time-sensitive alerts (e.g. incoming phone call)
  'urgent' => false,

  # optional, a string that is passed as an argument to action button callbacks
  'custom_data' => "123",

  # optional, add some action buttons to the notification
  # see https://pushpad.xyz/docs/action_buttons
  'actions' => array(
    array(
      'title' => "My Button 1",
      'target_url' => "https://example.com/button-link", # optional
      'icon' => "https://example.com/assets/button-icon.png", # optional
      'action' => "myActionName" # optional
    )
  ),

  # optional, bookmark the notification in the Pushpad dashboard (e.g. to highlight manual notifications)
  'starred' => true,

  # optional, use this option only if you need to create scheduled notifications (max 5 days)
  # see https://pushpad.xyz/docs/schedule_notifications
  'send_at' => strtotime('2016-07-25 10:09'), # use a function like strtotime or time that returns a Unix timestamp

  # optional, add the notification to custom categories for stats aggregation
  # see https://pushpad.xyz/docs/monitoring
  'custom_metrics' => array('examples', 'another_metric') # up to 3 metrics per notification
));

# deliver to a user
$notification->deliver_to($user_id);

# deliver to a group of users
$notification->deliver_to($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 array:

• '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.

License

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