Generating push notifications with Pushbullet and Silex

Sometimes I need to send push notifications to mobile apps (Android or iOS). It’s not difficult. Maybe it’s a bit of a nightmare the first few times, but when you understand the process it’s straightforward. Over the last few days I discovered a cool service called PushBullet. It allows me to install one client on Android/iOS and one on the desktop, and then send push notifications between them.

Pushbullet also has a good API, and it allows us to automate our push notifications. I’ve played a little bit with the API and my Raspberry Pi home server. It’s really simple to integrate the API with our Silex backend and send push notifications to our registered devices.

I’ve created one small service provider to enclose the API. The idea is to use one Silex application like this

use Silex\Application;
use PushSilex\Silex\Provider\PushbulletServiceProvider;

$app = new Application(['debug' => true]);

$myToken = include(__DIR__ . '/../conf/token.php');

$app->register(new PushbulletServiceProvider($myToken));

$app->get("/", function () {
    return "Usage: GET /note/{title}/{body}";
});

$app->get("/note/{title}/{body}", function (Application $app, $title, $body) {
    return $app->json($app['pushbullet.note']($title, $body));
});

$app->run();

As you can see, we’re using one service provider called PushbulletServiceProvider. This service provides us with pushbullet.note and allows us to send push notifications. We only need to configure our Service Provider with our Pushbullet’s token and that’s all.

<?php
namespace PushSilex\Silex\Provider;
use Silex\ServiceProviderInterface;
use Silex\Application;
class PushbulletServiceProvider implements ServiceProviderInterface
{
    private $accessToken;
    const URI = 'https://api.pushbullet.com/v2/pushes';
    const NOTE = 'note';
    public function __construct($accessToken)
    {
        $this->accessToken = $accessToken;
    }
    public function register(Application $app)
    {
        $app['pushbullet.note'] = $app->protect(function ($title, $body) {
            return $this->push(self::NOTE, $title, $body);
        });
    }
    private function push($type, $title, $body)
    {
        $data = [
            'type'  => $type,
            'title' => $title,
            'body'  => $body,
        ];
        $ch = curl_init();
        curl_setopt_array($ch, [
            CURLOPT_URL            => self::URI,
            CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER     => ['Content-Type' => 'application/json'],
            CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST  => 'POST',
            CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS     => $data,
            CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH       => CURLAUTH_BASIC,
            CURLOPT_USERPWD        => $this->accessToken . ':',
            CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true
        ]);
        $out = curl_exec($ch);
        curl_close($ch);

        return json_decode($out);
    }
    public function boot(Application $app)
    {
    }
}

Normally I use Guzzle to handle HTTP clients, but in this example I’ve created a raw curl connection.

You can see the project in my github account.