Notifo - Notification Service

Try it out at https://app.notifo.io!

Notifo is a multi-channel notification service for collaboration tools, e-commerce, news, magazines and everybody who wants to notify their users.

Features

• Powerful and rich REST API with OpenAPI documentation.
• Management UI to create notification templates, users, subscription, projects, settings and email templates.
• Email templates with MJML and Liquid Templates.
• Rich notification with a lot of formatting options like small and large images.
• Abstraction over multiple channels and providers
  • Emails (currently Amazon SES)
  • Web (Sockets)
  • WebPush (custom built)
  • MobilePush (currently Google Firebase)
  • SMS (currently MessageBird)
• Reliable through retry mechanisms and message queues for all notifications and channels.
• Tracking which notification has been read or confirmed.
• Integrated plugin to add a notification overlay to your web application.

Integrations

How it works

• Users subscribe to topics that are defined by a path such as clothes/shoes/nike. It is your job to provide a good UI for that.
• Backend creates events using very specific topic paths, such as clothes/shoes/nike/<model>.
• Notifo creates user events based on the matching subscriptions. Subscriptions are either for specific paths or parent paths as in the example above and having individual notification preferences.
• Queues and schedulers are responsible to send notifications to users when the notification has not been confirmed yet.

This allows a wide range of scenarios:

• In a task management system you can automatically subscribe users to a project, e.g. project/123 and use a notification preference to only send web notifiations or web push notifications. When a user manually subscribes to a specific task, e.g. project/123/tasks/abc you can create this subscription with a preference to send out emails as well.

• Notifications can have a confirmation preference (None, Explicit, Seen). Only unconfirmed notifications are sent through a channel and you can configure a delay when sending notifications. This means that a user does not receive a confirmation when he or she has already explicitly confirmed it (Explicit Mode) or has seen it (Seen mode). This avoids to spam your users which notifications he does not need anymore and you can also track who has seen or confirmed urgent and important notifications.

Have a look to the presentation to understand how it works.

How to run it

Before you install it, try it out at https://app.notifo.io

Install it using the docker image

docker images are available: https://hub.docker.com/r/squidex/notifo, you can try the docker-compose file.

Read more about the intallation in the wiki.

How to configure it

Have a look to the settings for all configuration options: appsettings.json. Everything in the settings can be configured using environment variables.

The following setting

"mongoDB": {
    "connectionString": "mongodb://localhost",
},

is mapped to the enviornment variable MONGODB__CONNECTIONSTRING (note the double underscore).

Read more about configuration in the wiki.

Tech Stack

Notifo uses the following technologies.

Server

• ASP.NET Core 6 for Multi-Platform Support
• SignalR for Sockets
• MongoDB (support for more Databases is planned)
• OpenID Connect

Frontend

• React
• React Router
• Formik
• Redux
• Redux Toolkit
• Typescript
• Bootstrap with custom Sass and Argon Design Theme.
• ...many more libraries.

Where is it used?

It was originally developed for Squidex Headless CMS (https://squidex.io), it is also used in a few other commercial applications in a testing stage.

Currently it is still in Beta and some features such as Mobile Push and Emails are not used in production yet.

How to contribute?

There is still a lot to do:

• Support for other databases (I would prefer https://github.com/sebastienros/yessql)
• Other Email providers.
• Other SMS providers.
• Test application for mobile push (iOS and Android)
• Hardening scheduling and message queues.
• More channels (e.g. WhatsApp or Voice).
• Testing and tests
• Automated API and UI tests and more tests in general.

Sponsors

Notifo is sponsored and used by the following companies.