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 nightmare the first times, but when you understand the process, it’s straightforward. Last days I discover a cool service called PushBullet. It allows us to install one client in our Android/IOS or even desktop computer, and send push notifications between them.

Pushbullet also has a good API, and it allows us to automate our push notifications. I’ve play 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 we can see we’re using one service providers called PushbulletServiceProvider. This service provides us ‘pushbullet.note’ and allows to send push notifications. We only need to configure our Service Provider with our Pushbulled’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