Safari Push Notification Server

Reference Server for pushing Safari Notifications via Apple Push Notification Service. Can be deployed to heroku in few steps and you can play as much as you want. Since SSL is required, in order to get the job done fast we are relying on heroku

Requirements

Heroku Account, Apple developer account

Usage

• Register your site with Apple (refer to this document )
• Create A New App on Heroku . Add cleardb mysql addon . Configure you workstation heroku toolbelt .
• Generate pem file used for apple push notifications ( Most Documentations miss this .) . (refer to Stack Overflow) - Detailed Explanation Below
• Edit config file . Add the p12 and pem files to root directory .
• Refer to comments in code for more info .
• Deploy code to ur heroku app . access https://example.herokuapp.com/db-create.php .delete the file by redeploying once database is created.
• Replace the images in pushPackage.raw/icon.iconset/ if you want.

Common issues

• (Trying this on your own server) You must be using an SSL (HTTPS) server, signed by a recognised authority. If you're looking for a free service, we've been using StartCom which works well.
• Requests must be mapped to /v1/request (for example https://example.herokuapp.com/v1/pushPackages must be a valid URL) - the included .htaccess file should do this for you if you upload the files to the server root
• You will probably need to specify domains with and without the "www." part in the config file (e.g. define('ALLOWED_DOMAINS', '"http://example.com", "http://www.example.com"'); )

Generating the .pem file

During the push registration process you should receive two files, the .p12 and website_aps_production.cer file. Apple calls this last one a "Website Push ID Production Certificate". The p12 file is used to create a push package (to request the user to accept notifications from your site). The cer file is used to actually send out push notifications by the server (to establish communication with APNS), but it seems it must be converted into a .pem file first, which the official documentation doesn't mention.

To perform this conversion, use the command openssl x509 -in website_aps_production.cer -inform DER -out apns-cert.pem -outform PEM in Terminal. See this Stackoverflow article for more information.

You can then test that you can connect to APNS using this file with the command openssl s_client -connect gateway.push.apple.com:2195 -CAfile apns-cert.pem

Sending a test push

If you've configured everything correctly, and are at the point where you are successfully able to subscribe to notifications through Safari, you can manually send a test notification from Terminal with:

curl --data-urlencode "title=Test" --data-urlencode "body=This is a test" --data-urlencode "button=View" --data-urlencode "urlargs=/" --data-urlencode "auth=your authentication code" https://example.herokuapp.com/v1/push

or if you know the specific device token to send the push to, replace https://example.herokuapp.com/v1/push with https://example.herokuapp.com/v1/push/devicetoken/

You can also do this in a browser, like so: https://example.herokuapp.com/v1/push?title=Test&body=This%20is%20a%20test&button=View&urlargs=%2F&auth=your_authentication_code (for a specific device, that's https://example.herokuapp.com/v1/push/devicetoken/?title=Test&body=This%20is%20a%20test&button=View&urlargs=%2F&auth=your_authentication_code)

Where to get more information

• Apple's documentation: https://developer.apple.com/notifications/safari-push-notifications/
• Certificate creation: http://www.raywenderlich.com/32960/apple-push-notification-services-in-ios-6-tutorial-part-1
• *Contact me on twitter - https://twitter.com/sojan_official / add an issue here.

Credits

Based on Safari-Push-Notifications by Connor LaCombe (https://github.com/connorlacombe/Safari-Push-Notifications)