notify_push/DEVELOPING.md

Developing

As developer of a Nextcloud app or client you can use the notify_push app to receive real time notifications from the Nextcloud server.

Nextcloud web interface

If you want to listen to incoming events from the web interface of your Nextcloud app, you can use the @nextcloud/notify_push javascript library. Which will handle all the details for authenticating and connecting to the push server.

import { listen } from '@nextcloud/notify_push'

let has_push = listen('notify_file', () => {
    console.log("A file has been changed")
})

if (!hash_push) {
    console.log("notify_push not available on the server")
}

Clients

Desktop and other clients that don't run in the Nextcloud web interface can use the following steps to receive notifications.

• Get the push server url from the notify_push capability by sending an authenticated request to https://cloud.example.com/ocs/v2.php/cloud/capabilities
• Open a websocket connection to the provided websocket url
• Send the username over the websocket connection
• Send the password over the websocket connection (see also [pre-authenticated tokens])
• If the credentials are correct, the server will return with "authenticated"
• The server will send the following notifications
  • "notify_file" when a file for the user has been changed
  • "notify_activity" when a new activity item for a user is created (note, due to workings of the activity app, file related activity doesn't trigger this notification)
  • "notify_notification" when a notification is created, processed or dismissed for a user
• Starting with version 0.4 you can opt into receiving the changed file ids for file update notifications by sending listen notify_file_id over the websocket.
  Once enabled, the server will send "notify_file_id" followed by a json encoded array of file ids if the push server knows the ids of the changed files. In cases where there push server doesn't know which files have changed, it will send the regular "notify_file" message.

Example

An example javascript implementation would be

function discover_endpoint(nextcloud_url, user, password) {
    let headers = new Headers();
    headers.set('Accept', 'application/json');
    headers.set('OCS-APIREQUEST', 'true');
    headers.set('Authorization', 'Basic ' + btoa(user + ":" + password));

    return fetch(`${nextcloud_url}/ocs/v2.php/cloud/capabilities`, {
        method: 'GET',
        headers: headers,
    })
        .then(response => response.json())
        .then(json => json.ocs.data.capabilities.notify_push.endpoints.websocket);
}

function listen(url, user, password) {
    let ws = new WebSocket(url);
    ws.onmessage = (msg) => {
        console.log(msg);
    }
    ws.onopen = () => {
        ws.send(user);
        ws.send(password);
    }
}

let username = "...";
let password = "...";
let nextcloud_url = "https://cloud.example.com";
discover_endpoint(nextcloud_url, username, password).then((endpoint) => {
    console.log(`push server is at ${endpoint}`)
    listen(endpoint, "admin", "admin");
});

Pre-authenticated tokens

In situations where you don't have the user credentials but you can send authenticated requests to nextcloud(such as when you have authenticated cookies) you can use "pre-authenticated tokens" instead of the username and password.

• Get the pre_auth endpoint from the ocs capabilities request
• Send an authenticated request to the endpoint, a token will be returned.
• Open the websocket as normal
• Send an empty string as username over the websocket
• Send the token from the pre_auth request as passwor

Sending custom events

You can send custom events from a nextcloud app using the methods provided by OCA\NotifyPush\IQueue.

// in a real app, you'll want to setup DI to get an instance of `IQueue`
$queue = \OC::$server->get(OCA\NotifyPush\IQueue::class);
$queue->push('notify_custom', [
	'user' => "uid",
	'message' => "my_message_type",
    'body' => ["foo" => "bar"], // optional
]);

Which will be pushed to client as 'my_message_type {"foo": "bar"}' and can be used with the @nextcloud/notify_push client using

import { listen } from '@nextcloud/notify_push'

listen('my_message_type', (message_type, optional_body) => {

})

Building

The server binary is built using rust and cargo, and requires a minimum of rust 1.74.

• Install rust through your package manager or rustup
• Run cargo build

Any build intended for production use or distribution should be compiled in release mode for optimal performance and targeting musl libc for improved portability.

cargo build --release --target=x86_64-unknown-linux-musl

Cross compiling

Cross compiling to other platforms can be done using two ways:

• using nix and nix build .#aarch64-unknown-linux-musl (recommended, binaries can be found in ./result/bin)
• using cross and cross build --release --target=aarch64-unknown-linux-musl