A small webtask to be run on webtask.io to send push notifications.
First you will need to setup push notifications for your device. If you need help with this part, there is a good tutorial on Ray Wenderlich's site that you can go through.
You will also need the certificate and key provided by Apple for push notifications. You can get them from the Developer Center or use fastlane to create them for you.
We're going to pretend that you named them cert.pem and key.pem and that they are in the same directory as app.js.
This should be pretty easy assuming you have webtask's wt-cli installed.
All you have to do is create a new webtask, passing in your certificate and key as secrets to it.
$ wt create app.js --name push --no-parse --no-merge --secret cert="$(cat cert.pem)" --secret key="$(cat key.pem)"
By default, webtask-push will use the sandbox APNS server. If you want to use the production server, you will also need to pass in --secret environment=production when you create the webtask.
Make sure you include the cert and key in your secret as well as --no-parse and --no-merge, because Express is being used inside!
webtask-push provides 1 simple API endpoint that you can call to send a push request.
All you have to do is send a POST request to your webtask URL with some JSON data in the body. webtask-push will forward the data to Apple's servers, and send the notification to your app.
While the only required parameter is token, it probably doesn't make sense to send an empty notification to your app.
Here is an example of a possible JSON object with all supported properties filled in:
{
"token": "DEVICE_TOKEN",
"message": "Your opponent just made a move! Check it out!",
"badge": 1,
"sound": "alert.aiff",
"contentAvailable": true,
"payload": {
"opponentPosition": {
"x": 3,
"y": 16
}
}
}This would get parsed, and sent to Apple. The resulting information you would receive in the userInfo in your iOS app would look like:
{
"aps": {
"alert": "Your opponent just made a move! Check it out!",
"badge": 1,
"sound": "alert.aiff",
"content-available": 1
},
"opponentPosition": {
"x": 3,
"y": 16
}
}token - Required - Device Token for the device you want to send the message to.
message - Message to display in the alert when the message is received.
badge - The number to display in the badge on the app icon. There will be no change if no data is sent. The badge will disappear if you send 0;
sound - The sound included in your app to play when the notification is received.
contentAvailable - Whether or not there is content to be downloaded. true is the only value that will do anything.
The parameters above correspond directly to the values in the aps dictionary specified in the Push Notification Documentation
payload - JSON Object that contains any other data that you want to send along with the notification. All the data inside here will be at the same level as the aps object in the data received in your iOS app.
Right now, webtask-push is a very simple one-off send-a-push webtask, but it could definitely be made better.
Probably the most glaring issue is security. Since it's just an open endpoint, there's nothing that prevents someone from sending a whole bunch of requests with device tokens and spamming all your users.
Another thing that could be improved is to send to multiple devices.
webtask-push is released under the MIT License. See LICENSE.md for details.