ello/ello-notifications repository overview

⁠Ello Notifications Service

⁠Responsibilities

• registration of devices with Amazon SNS
• generation and dispatch of push notifications to mobile devices
• logging and processing of delivery failures

⁠Requirements

• Ruby 2.2.2 -- specified using .ruby-version
• Postgresql -- brew install postgresql
• Redis -- brew install redis-server
• Protobuf -- reference installation requirements in ElloProtobufs gem

⁠Setup

This project uses dotenv-rails⁠ to manage application configuration in development. To get started, you need to cp .env.example .env to setup the local development environment variables.

⁠Lexicon

• SNS - Amazon Simple Notification Service - provider service for platform agnostic push notification delivery and management
• APNS - Apple Push Notification Service - provider service for end-user delivery of iOS push notifications
• GCM - Google Cloud Messaging - provider service for end-user delivery of Android push notifications

⁠Service Authentication

We are using basic auth for service authentication. It's not a robost enough solution once we have multiple services in play, but it will suffice for now without making things overly complicated. Check the .env file for the proper environment variables related to basic auth. The same values will need to be used by clients that communicate with the service.

⁠AWS Configuration

In order to communicate with SNS, the notifications service needs to be configured with an access key, secret, and specified region. The key pair only needs access to SNS, not other AWS components.

⁠Testing Locally

Since protocol buffers are a binary communication format, you have to test the notification creation end-points with encoded binary directly. Chrome extensions like Postman and XHR Poster don't work well for this because of how they treat backslashes in the raw body as real backslashes rather than escaping characters for multi-byte characters.

As a result, testing with curl is recommended:

curl http://lvh.me:3000/notifications/create --data-binary @./relative/path/to/request_object -H "Content-Type: application/octet-stream" -H "Accept: application/octet-stream"

In the example above, the encoded data for a notification creation has been saved to a test file, which is sent as binary by curl. You can easily encode test objects from the Rails console:

f = File.open('./request_object', 'w:ASCII-8BIT')
ElloProtobufs::SomeService::CreateResourceRequest.new({ object_param: 'value' }).encode_to(f)
f.close

The response from the server will also be binary information, and in order to decode it, you will have to decode it into a response object:

f = File.open('./response_object', 'r:ASCII-8BIT')
response = ElloProtobufs::SomeService::CreateResourceResponse.decode_from(f)
f.close

⁠License

Ello Notifications is released under the MIT License⁠

⁠Code of Conduct

Ello was created by idealists who believe that the essential nature of all human beings is to be kind, considerate, helpful, intelligent, responsible, and respectful of others. To that end, we will be enforcing the Ello rules⁠ within all of our open source projects. If you don’t follow the rules, you risk being ignored, banned, or reported for abuse.