Urbanairship is a Ruby library for interacting with the Urban Airship API.

Installation

gem install urbanairship

Note: if you are using Ruby 1.8, you should also install the system_timer gem for more reliable timeout behaviour. See http://ph7spot.com/musings/system-timer for more information.

Configuration

Urbanairship.application_key = 'application-key'
Urbanairship.application_secret = 'application-secret'
Urbanairship.master_secret = 'master-secret'
Urbanairship.logger = Rails.logger
Urbanairship.request_timeout = 5 # default

Usage

Registering a device token

Urbanairship.register_device('DEVICE-TOKEN')

Unregistering a device token

Urbanairship.unregister_device('DEVICE-TOKEN')

Sending a push notification

notification = {
  :schedule_for => [1.hour.from_now],
  :device_tokens => ['DEVICE-TOKEN-ONE', 'DEVICE-TOKEN-TWO'],
  :aps => {:alert => 'You have a new message!', :badge => 1}
}

Urbanairship.push(notification) # =>
# {
#   "scheduled_notifications" => ["https://go.urbanairship.com/api/push/scheduled/123456"]
# }

Batching push notification sends

notifications = [
  {
    :schedule_for => [{ :alias => 'deadbeef', :scheduled_time => 1.hour.from_now }],
    :device_tokens => ['DEVICE-TOKEN-ONE', 'DEVICE-TOKEN-TWO'],
    :aps => {:alert => 'You have a new message!', :badge => 1}
  },
  {
    :schedule_for => [3.hours.from_now],
    :device_tokens => ['DEVICE-TOKEN-THREE'],
    :aps => {:alert => 'You have a new message!', :badge => 1}
  }
]

Urbanairship.batch_push(notifications)

Sending broadcast notifications

Urban Airship allows you to send a broadcast notification to all active registered device tokens for your app.

notification = {
  :schedule_for => [1.hour.from_now],
  :aps => {:alert => 'Important announcement!', :badge => 1}
}

Urbanairship.broadcast_push(notification)

Polling the feedback API

The first time you attempt to send a push notification to a device that has uninstalled your app (or has opted-out of notifications), both Apple and Urban Airship will register that token in their feedback API. Urban Airship will prevent further attempted notification sends to that device, but it's a good practice to periodically poll Urban Airship's feedback API and mark those tokens as inactive in your own system as well.

# find all device tokens deactivated in the past 24 hours
Urbanairship.feedback(24.hours.ago) # =>
# [
#   {
#     "marked_inactive_on"=>"2011-06-03 22:53:23",
#     "alias"=>nil,
#     "device_token"=>"DEVICE-TOKEN-ONE"
#   },
#   {
#     "marked_inactive_on"=>"2011-06-03 22:53:23",
#     "alias"=>nil,
#     "device_token"=>"DEVICE-TOKEN-TWO"
#   }
# ]

Deleting scheduled notifications

If you know the alias or id of a scheduled push notification then you can delete it from Urban Airship's queue and it will not be delivered.

Urbanairship.delete_scheduled_push("123456789")
Urbanairship.delete_scheduled_push(123456789)
Urbanairship.delete_scheduled_push(:alias => "deadbeef")

Using Urbanairship with Android

The Urban Airship API extends a subset of their push API to Android devices. You can read more about what is currently supported here, but as of this writing, only registration, aliases, tags, broadcast, individual push, and batch push are supported.

To use this library with Android devices, you can set the provider configuration option to :android:

Urbanairship.provider = :android

Alternatively, you can pass the :provider => :android option to device registration calls if your app uses Urbanairship to send notifications to both Android and iOS devices.

Urbanairship.register_device("DEVICE-TOKEN", :provider => :android)

Note: all other supported actions use the same API endpoints as iOS, so it is not necessary to specify the provider as :android when calling them.

When sending notifications to Android devices, the Urban Airship API expects the following basic structure:

notification = {
  :schedule_for => [1.hour.from_now],
  :apids => ['DEVICE-TOKEN-ONE', 'DEVICE-TOKEN-TWO'],
  :android => {:alert => 'You have a new message!', :extra => {:foo => 'bar'}}
}

Urbanairship.push(notification)

---

Note: all public library methods will return either an array or a hash, depending on the response from the Urban Airship API. In addition, you can inspect these objects to find out if they were successful or not, and what the http response code from Urban Airship was.

response = Urbanairship.push(payload)
response.success? # => true
response.code # => '200'
response.inspect # => "{\"scheduled_notifications\"=>[\"https://go.urbanairship.com/api/push/scheduled/123456\"]}"

If the call to Urban Airship times out, you'll get a response object with a '503' code.

response = Urbanairship.feedback(1.year.ago)
response.success? # => false
response.code # => '503'
response.inspect # => "{\"error\"=>\"Request timeout\"}"