joraeuw
ExNudge - Push Notification Library for Elixir
Hello everyone,
I have been working with Elixir for the past 3+ years and I think its about time I give something back to the community. I have been looking for a library that allows me to easily send push notifications to PWA, by abstracting myself from the RFC’s involved and the encryption logic but I didn’t find anything suitable so I decided to build one myself.
ExNudge is a pure elixir library that send push notifications to web clients (I use it for a PWA) using the protocol described under RFC 8291 and RFC 8292 (VAPID). I plan on expanding it a bit with for example retry system on failed requests and FCM/APNS specific implementation, but that all depends on wether or not its being useful to someone ![]()
Feel free to ask for features, fork and create a PR or an issue and tell me what you think, I would love to get some feedback both on the ease of use and code quality!
Thank you for your time :))
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joraeuw
Yeah sure! I will create a Phoenix example very soon. Perhaps by the end of tomorrow. The tokens come from PushManager. I will add a better explanation and a code example to clarify further.
christhekeele
Yup! In compiled BEAM files, including both Erlang and Elixir, module names are just atoms, and both can cross-call each other. Elixir’s namespaced Module.Names are just fancy wrappers around compile-time verified and alias-friendly atoms.
Elixir, designed after Erlang, has the luxury of making calling Erlang module cross-calls as elegant as :module_name.function(). To do something similar from Erlang you have to deal with the more ungainly 'Elixir.Module.Name':function() syntax. This is why Elixir libraries “supporting” Erlang better will often simply defmodule Module.Name and then implement a defmodule :module_name that defdelegates to Elixir functions, to make it nicer to call from Erlang as module_name:function().
I also think “Erlangifying” an Elixir library involves making it support rebar3 in practice, but I have no experience on this front.
tangui
Yeah, the JOSE library that you use does exactly that, you can take a look at the code. It’s way easier to use Erlang from Elixir, than the opposite. If you write the core in Erlang, you have the guarantee that someone somewhere in a basement some time in the future will be grateful ![]()
Other remarks:
- you force the use of
HTTPoisonupon the user. An alternative is to useTeslaand let the user choose its favorite HTTP library (example). Another option is to write a behaviour for HTTP requesting and let the user implement its own (and / or provide with a default implementation securely using for instancehttpc). I’d normalize the success response as well, now it’s{:ok, %HTTPoison{}}but what if you change the library in the future? Does the response actually contains something useful? - many modules seem to be for internal use - you can add
@moduledoc falseto prevent having them in the doc - I would have let the user handle batch sending notifications, as Elixir has all the needed primitives for that, and there might be other ways to do it (if you want “at least once” delivery then you’d probably use Oban). Thus I’d remove
ExNudge.send_notifications/3 - It seems to me
ExNudge.generate_vapid_keys/0is used at config time. Maybe a Mix task would be more useful? I think other Web Push libraries do that - I personnaly like when errors are returned in the
{:error, Exception.t()}form: exception are better documented (example), can have a default error message, additional information and in case you don’t know what to do with them you can just throw (raise) them away
Cheers!
Last Post!
joraeuw
I just uploaded the example. Feel free to check it out. Just make sure to change the dependency if you’re going to extract only the example from {:ex_nudge, path: “…”} to {:ex_nudge, “~> 1.0”} .
Tell me if you run into some issues. For some reason the notification did not work on chrome on my machine (MacBook) perhaps it was a permission thing.
Thank you for your patience ![]()
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