---
title: Web push with Ruby on Rails
slug: web-push-with-ruby-on-rails
published_at: 2021-04-26 23:04:03 +0000
updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:14:16 +0000
summary: 
description: Learn how to implement web push notifications in an ruby on rails application. In the next episode, we'll integrate with the noticed gem and create a custom delivery method. #rails #rubyonrails
tags: [web push with ruby on rails, webpush, webpush gem, rails, ruby on rails, ruby on rails tutorial, web push tutorial, webpush tutorial, webpush rails, webpush ruby on rails, how to send webpush notifications, how to subscribe users to webpush with javascript, webpush js, webpush javascript, js, javascript]
views: 5923
author: CJ Avilla
url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/web-push-with-ruby-on-rails
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0XJ9cLfoTs
youtube_id: d0XJ9cLfoTs
embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/d0XJ9cLfoTs
thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/d0XJ9cLfoTs/hqdefault.jpg
type: video
---

# Web push with Ruby on Rails

*Published: April 26, 2021*
*Views: 5923*

## Watch

[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0XJ9cLfoTs)

[![Web push with Ruby on Rails](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/d0XJ9cLfoTs/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0XJ9cLfoTs)

## Description

Learn how to implement web push notifications in an ruby on rails application. In the next episode, we'll integrate with the noticed gem and create a custom delivery method.
#rails #rubyonrails

## Transcript

welcome back what's up everyone today what we're going to do is work on adding web push to our rails application or to a rails application web push is that thing where you're in the browser and you'll get a notification so you might have seen these from like when you receive an instagram message or when someone comments on something on reddit lots of web applications are starting to implement this thing where you'll get like a little pop-up notification and in apple it'll even show in your notifications bar here on the right side and so the way this works is you can dig into a lot of the details by going through this web fundamentals course that is here on the developers google docs but it turns out that there is a ruby gem called web push this is a really nice uh really nice gem that handles a lot of stuff for you and so we're going to go through the process of setting up the gem and there's these five steps that you have to do i think a couple of them are optional but we're going to go through the process of setting all this up so that we can run a uh run a little notification when we receive so the idea would be that we're going to continue building on our form 4 application and we want to be notified when an interesting trade happens on the sec's website this could be any number of things though anytime you want to notify your customer you might want to send a web push and so we're going to go through these steps number one is we're going to generate a vapid key so it's a voluntary application server id key and then we are going to set up a manifest.json you don't actually need to do this it'll work without it but then we're also going to install a service worker which is a little bit of javascript that will run in the background you can sort of like install it permanently in the browser i think like sort of that's kind of how you think about it and then um from the server we can um we can use the web push gem to like to publish a notification to some endpoint that um that we'll get back from a subscription which we get back from the push manager and then ultimately our service worker is going to listen for these push events and can trigger these notifications that actually pop up there's a few different things that are that are happening here let's go through the process and do step one here which is we're going to generate these this one time key so i'm going to jump into the terminal uh and in my gem file i'm just going to add gem uh i think it's web push yeah so web push and we'll bundle install so we're going to install that web push gem and it has some tools for generating this one-time key it turns out you only need to run this step one time so we're just going to use this function of the gem to create our vapid keys we're going to say keys are web push dot generate key and this is going to give us both a public and private key so we can say keys dot public key is this and keys dot private key is this so we're just going to store this public key and private key in our rails credentials so that um we can so that we can use these keys when we're making um when we're publishing uh notifications to these web push endpoints so i'm going to grab this key that ends in an equals sign and let's just open a new terminal here form for tracker i'm going to say rails credentials uh editor rails credentials colon edit this will open up my rails credentials for this application i already have my alpha vantage key here so i'm going to just say web push and i'm going to say pre or i think okay so we're going to do public key first public key first and we're going to copy and paste our public key and we'll do private key and we'll pop we'll drop in our private key and after this is over i'm going to change these keys so don't there's no need to like copy them all right so now that we've got these in our credentials we should be able to use them in our application so that was like that's kind of a step one here i'm going to say exit clear and all right so let's go to the next step here we want to create a manifest.json file that's going to be linked and that has like a bunch of settings for for our application so let's just go to the public directory and create manifest.json and in here this is just going to be a json object that says that defines things about our web application so there's a whole dock here on mdn about all of the different things that you can set inside of a web manifest i think the one we want for sure is our name we're just going to call this like form for tracker or something i don't actually know what the name is going to be or if it's going to have a real name you can also put things like icons links to icons and such inside of here default background colors start urls etc etc there's like a whole bunch of things that you can drop in to your web manifest we're just going to put the name for now and we'll call that good all right the next thing we want to do is in the user's browser we want to add a service worker um and so if we scroll down in the docs here for the web push gem we'll see a little bit of information about how we register the service worker so it turns out that like when you when you call navigator.serviceworker.register you're going to pass it a path and this path is to a javascript file that we want to like install basically into the browser when the user loads the browser so we need to create some javascript file that's going to be at a well-known public location so in the same directory here in the same public directory i'm going to just create a serviceworker.js whoops dot js okay and then here i'm just going to say console.log like hi from the service worker and that's it that's all we're going to put in there for now is just hi from the service worker and then let's create a new uh controller just to like experiment with this and test it out say rails g controller uh notifications we'll give it an index view um this will be just kind of like a view that we can drop into i'm going to go to my routes file and make sure that we have this resources notifications and then in our notification index we need to do a couple of things here so we're going to add a script tag to this page that will actually register the service worker you could probably put this in your app manifest or i'm sorry in your application.js or some other place but we're just going to keep everything right here just so that we can see it all in one place and keep it real simple for now okay so when we're installing the service worker actually this should this should totally work fine for installing so let's actually just copy and paste this in and we called our service worker oh it says to put this in application.js whatever it doesn't it's yeah it doesn't matter uh we'll keep it right here all right so then um all right so if there is a ser okay so if window.navigator.serviceworker exists then we're going to register this service worker file and then after this registration is going to return a promise that resolves with the registration thing and then we're going to console that log the service worker change register the service worker and then if there is no service worker on the navigator then we're just going to console.log the service worker is not supported in this browser okay so at this point i want to probably restart the server since we installed some gems and things and then head back over to the browser and go to localhost 3000 and i'm going to go to slash notifications and open up the the developer tools here and look at that we already have the log statements that we were hoping for so down here we see hi from the service worker and we also see the service worker change register the service worker and you'll notice that in the sources tab on the left underneath uh at the very bottom here we see service worker has these little gears we can open that up and it'll tell us that it's talking about the service worker from this domain from localhost with port3000 and if we click on serviceworker we can see the code for our service worker so this is all working great so what we want to do now is when we register the service worker we want to set up a subscription a push subscription and so the way that that works is we use the public key that we generated earlier that public vapid key and we call what do we call we call subscribe so we're going to say like as soon as the service worker is ready we're going to subscribe and we're going to pass in our vapid public key now it needs to be in like a very specific format so we're going to just add the vapid key directly to the window in some i mean we don't have to actually add it to the window we can just use this and set it up in a similar way so at the very top i'm going to say that our vapid key is what is this const vapid key uiint array so base64 url safe decode 64. and then our vapid public key is available in rails.application.credentials.dig web push and public key okay so if we refresh the page here and go to notifications we should see a public key okay so we we see that the um the unsigned integer array that has our public key just dropped directly right here and so that's our vapid public key so that's great the next step is to actually pass that as an argument as the application server key argument when the um when the server when the service worker is ready we want to like call this subscribe which is going to give us back a subscription and that subscription depending on which browser it is and which um which web push endpoints it's giving you back it'll give you a different endpoints and different like authorization tokens which says that you are allowed to send notifications to this customer now every single um like when they were building the spec out this they were thinking about allowing developers to create push notifications to the browser um and not notifying the customer or not notifying the user uh but they thought that people would do naughty things like start tracking their location and such and so they added this this flag to the api spec that said um you have to pass user visible only as true and then um the idea would be that like by saying user visible only we're going to notify the user and they're going to see something uh and there are there's discussions about maybe passing um or building other mechanisms by which you could have some budget of requests that you could use to send to the customer's browser but for now um you have to like show a notification you can't just like do stuff in the background without them knowing about it so this is this is an argument that you have to pass even though it doesn't really do anything it just says that like you are committing to like showing a notification when you send them something then we also have to pass our application server key so this is with vapid you can also do this without vapid if you are in chrome only and you're using this gcm sender id thingy um okay so let's let's grab this so when the service worker is supported installed and activated subscribe the push manager property subscribe to the push manager property with the vapid public key so we're going to grab this and uh we need to drop this in here okay i think right so we're going to register the service worker and then we are going to say when if the service worker is ready then uh we have the registration and the push manager we're going to subscribe we're going to pass it our vapid public key and i believe this should resolve with a subscription so let's take a look here so once it's ready push manager.getsubscription okay so right um yes so um for now let's just console.log the result of this of subscribe so we're going to say then function i i'm like 90 sure args uh i'm 90 sure this is gonna give us a push like a um a it's gonna be of type push subscription and it'll be right here so i'm just gonna call it sub and we should be able to console.log it here console.log like sub okay so we're saying like register the service worker then when it's ready uh subscribe and then we're gonna console.log the subscription if if it worked so if we refresh this page here do you see how this notification popped up and says do you want to show notification so when we call subscribe this is us asking the user for permission to send them notifications and if they say allow so i'm sure you've seen this right you're going around on uh maybe you're on a gaming site or you're on uh yeah instagram is the one that just keeps coming to mind right when you get uh when you get a notification that someone has like liked your picture or whatever then you'll get a notification so when um when we call subscribe here and say allow we are uh we're giving permission to localhost 3000 to send notifications to us so what we can do now is we can say allow and you'll you'll notice that like our promise here is resolving with a push subscription object okay and that has an endpoint so in this case it's using the google apis fcm i don't know what fcm stands for but depending on which browser you're using it might create an endpoint that goes to some other domain some other url and in fact this endpoint is going to be unique to this specific subscription so if we were to like unregister our service worker later and then try to re-ask for permission to send notifications we would get a different endpoint so at this point what we want to do is say like json.json.stringify sub and that's going to be the like the json representation for the subscription that we want to store in our database in our rails application so that we can use web push to send a notification so um there's kind of a lot going on here so we registered the service worker we are we've got permission once we get permission it yields to us the subscription object we're going to take the data from the subscription object we're going to put it in the database and then we're going to use web push on the server to basically send a request to the endpoint associated with the subscription and whatever other data that we want to send it's almost like a web hook for the browser so you can kind of think of that endpoint as like a web hook endpoint for the browser where we're we're pushing a notification to the browser and then the browser can pop up the little notification window on the on the side so what we want to do now is instead of just console.logging the subscription here we want to like make an api call to pass this stringified subscription to the server and then we want to uh save that into some database model that will likely be related to some customer later or to some user some user model later and then we can send notifications to that user until they decide to unsubscribe so let's do that now let's go create um like in our notifications controller let's create uh an uh create endpoint and this will accept post requests um let's say skip off i'm just gonna skip verifying authenticity so we can keep it super simple and the data that we're getting back is going to have like an endpoint expiration time auth like a whole bunch of little things here so what does this actually give us so let's say json.parse of this thing i just want to see like the actual json object interestingly if you just say sub it doesn't like the class the push subscription class doesn't let you see the keys which is probably some security mechanism so by stringifying it we pop out the keys and then by like uh this little trick of uh like stringifying and then parsing is just to get us like back to just a normal json object that doesn't have um this class of push subscription anyways we're gonna need the endpoint expiration time and then the keys are going to give us like this auth token and then p256dh no idea what that is or like what it stands for but we need to pass this data when we're when we're making a push request so let's actually say like uh let's say that we want to create a new notification model so we'll say rails g model um web push notification and it's going to have an endpoint and it's going to have um auth p and p256 dh key and those will all be strings and then we don't have any user models yet but eventually we might want to add user models later so we're going to create a model called web push notification the reason i'm not just calling it notification here is that i want to try out chris oliver's notified gem later and i don't know if it's going to collide so i'm just going to name this web push notification and we can say rake db migrate sure like migrate the database oh gosh what's what's going on here uh gem cleanup i don't know why we need sinatra that's interesting whatever um okay so it migrated fine whatever let's go to our back to our notifications controller and in here we're gonna say uh web push notification dot create or dot new and then we'll say endpoint is so i was thinking about using strong params but i don't think we want to because this keys thing is like nested inside of the object so i'm just going to kind of like keep it all top level we'll just say like params uh end point and then oh gosh what did we call this thing so bundle exec annotate dash dash models bundle or like annotate bundle exec annotate models boom okay so in our web push notification model here we have our endpoint we have our auth key that's going to be params keys auth and then we have our p256 key which is going to be params keys um p256dh and then we'll say you know this is a i don't know at notification uh if at notification dot save else and i don't know we'll just like say render json for add notification else render json notification.errors.full messages sure i don't know just trying to like create the web notification model basically okay uh and then from our from our javascript right in our notifications index.html file here rather than just console logging the subscription we want to make a fetch call that's going to be a post request to notifications and we're going to pass in the stringified subscription and then we'll get back the the data and we'll just say like console.log data which should like save that to our database so if we come back over here and we hard refresh um a weight is only valid inside async functions okay um can you say async let's see okay look look at that okay cool so since we already allowed localhost 3000 to send us notifications it doesn't ask us again unless we unregister the service worker i think so if we click play now um we got back id one so this is actually like the re the the json for the rails model that came back so this is fantastic if we jump into uh rails console here rails c we'll see the web push notification dot last is our uh it has our endpoint it has an auth key and a psd whatever wow awesome it filtered it that's cool so those are secret like you can't see those uh i'm gonna unregister this anyway so you're not gonna be able to send anything to me but whatever okay what's next what's next here so we've got we've got our uh our service workers installed and it's push manager property subscribe to events and it's creating a subscription json object on the client we passed that to the server we've saved it on the server all right so we're on to step four here which is we're going to use that web push gem to send a notification with that subscription object obtained from the client and some optional payload message hopefully this works let's see let's see what we can do so from here i think we might even be able to say like web push dot payload send yeah okay so where is where is this method payload send okay so we want to send some message we'll say like test and we want to send the end point which is going to be let's actually store this notification dot last in some variables we'll say like n equals underscore because the most recently run thing was web notification.last we can use the underscore to reference the most recently run thing and then we can say yeah so let's let's clear this and say okay so web push dot payload send and we're going to send message is test and we're going to send endpoint is n.end point and this p 2 56 d h thing is uh n dot p 2 56 d h key and then there's auth which is going to be n auth key and then we also need to pass a hash under vapid um and that is going to be our private key private key which is going to be rails.cred dot application dot credentials dig web push i almost wonder if they should make like a nice helper method for this that would just be like creds dot something and it would just be a shortcut for that because i don't like writing out rails.application.credentials every single time it's super annoying please please make that a thing private key and then same thing for public key and here we're going to say rails.application.credentials or actually yeah could you leave a comment below tell me how you do this do you always write outrails.application.credentials.uh dig or like use square brackets to to reach into this or are you kind of like destructuring it before you make the call because this is painful if you've got a workaround i would love to hear that so please leave a comment we'd love to hear what you've what you've got going on there so web push public key public key and i don't know should we give it a whirl look at that okay 201 created okay but i don't see any notifications popping up oh do you know why it's because even though we have successfully sent the notification we have not actually set up the last step here which is to make the service worker receive push events and then trigger the notifications so we're i think we have this web push thing working maybe let's actually extract this call and drop it into as like a helper method in notification because it's um it's kind of annoying to have to write that every time so let's go to notification and let's just say like send or like def send and i'm just going to paste this in and then clean it up okay so now we should be able to say just like web push notification.last.send test and it should plop plop that test notification in front of us once we've completed our uh our javascript implementation here so let's go back to notifications index and we need to add the code oh actually no we need to go to our service worker to add the code to then like listen for push events so this is again the service worker is code that's going to like run in the background we're sort of installing this javascript into the browser and what we want to do now is we want to handle or we want to like listen for those notifications that are coming to that endpoint and so the way that this works is we need to this is kind of like setting up a webhook handler almost so we're gonna we're gonna set up a listener here and this works a little bit odd we have we actually say like self.advent listener i believe so let's find the code for that yeah so this is what we're gonna do here so i'm just going to grab this and yeah and we'll drop it in here so instead of saying like window dot add event listener or document.add event listener we can say self dot and in this case self refers to the service worker itself okay and then we're going to say push and this is the event type that we're listening for on the service worker and this is the event type that will happen it's that's the event type that's going to fire when we receive a push notification okay so we're going to get uh the event data and the event data is text or we're going to say a message and then we're going to pass we're calling event.wait until and then calling show notification so this is what should actually like pop up the notification um and so let's just let's just uh see if we can get this popping in the browser so i'm going to hard refresh and then click on service worker and you'll notice that like the code for the service worker here didn't change and i think that's because um even though we changed the code on slash public like service worker.js it didn't like bust the cache or whatever so if we come back over here and hard refresh this then come to service worker then it knows like okay we have some new uh some new stuff happening here the other thing that i wanted to point out is that even though we're refreshing the page okay ah so we are we're running into an issue because every time we reload the page these these promises are sort of like just going to resolve successfully if we've already done that thing so if we've already registered the service worker it's going to resolve successfully if the service worker is ready it's going to resolve successfully if we're already subscribed it's going to resolve successfully with the same subscription and then we're going to call the slash notifications and we're going to try again to create another subscription in the database and so you'll notice that the data here that's being logged out we have five we have four we have three so we're actually creating several web push notification objects in the database even though nothing is changing from from each for each of them so actually let's look at that so you'll notice that the auth key is not changing so if you have a new subscription that is legit new then the auth key is going to be different so i think what we want to do is we want to modify our create endpoint to make it more like a create or update endpoint where we're going to just look using the auth key we'll try to find an existing web push notification object in the database if it exists we'll make it a no op but we can make that improvement in just a second so let's let's let's just try to confirm that so that's a bug we'll come back and fix the bug in a second but um so if we say web push notification dot last we should be able to say like dot send like test and oh my gosh okay you can't see it on that screen because it's on my other screen but i have we received a push notification so if we come over here and we look at my notifications you can see that i received this test notification from localhost and it says we have received a push message so this is the type of message that you're going to see i like i don't know how apple organizes where that pops up on the desktop mine happens on this other screen so you can't see it when it's popping up but it's so exciting because um yeah just it uh it's working so we've got to fix our one little bug and that is to only create or update or yeah only create these subscriptions if the auth key is different and then we should be good to go all right so let's jump out of rails console let's go back to our notifications controller and let's go to our our endpoint here so we're going to say like at notification equals web push notification dot find by auth key and we'll pass in params keys off and if at notification or yeah actually we don't even need an instance variable here this we can just use um a local variable so if there's no notification then we'll create a new one that way we don't end up creating a whole bunch of notifications for the same subscription and ideally right we would have a logged in current user and we could create this web notification for that users we might say like user equals current user or similar so that we can associate all the different subscriptions maybe the user has like a personal laptop and then they have their ipad or they i don't know like they have their android device or something and they're they want to register on a whole bunch of different um machines like you could set up different subscriptions for each of their devices sort of that's like kind of one way that you might think of it and so a user would have many web push notification subscriptions so this might even be better named as like a like web push subscription or something um but for now whatever web push notification yeah because a notification would be like the individual notification so notification is a bad model name but um we got it working and that's that's what's uh that's what's matter that's what matters so um okay so the other thing that i wanted to see was that the actual content here we have received a push message i believe that's defined as part of the um this index here or i'm sorry the service worker um we yeah so we have received a push message so technically i think that you could pass this data from the server in our case for our like sort of stock tracking thing we're going to probably want to send you know the ticker symbol the some trade information who was the trader how much did they exchange etc um so we'll come back and we'll make those adjustments to kind of like connect our polling for the form for service to this web push notification system in uh in a future episode hopefully this was useful i really like playing around with this stuff so um if you enjoyed this episode and if you made it this long i would really appreciate if you just took a quick second and threw a like on this video otherwise if you're enjoying this content well yeah i'm continuing on with this series and we'll keep working on our our tool to track the stock trades that are happening on security exchange commission thanks so much for watching and we'll see you next [Music] time

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