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Pusher Channels HTTP Python Library

Build Status PyPI version

This package lets you trigger events to your client and query the state of your channels. When used with a server, you can validate webhooks and authenticate private- or presence- channels.

In order to use this library, you need to have a free account on http://pusher.com. After registering, you will need the application credentials for your app.

Supported Platforms

  • Python - supports Python versions 2.7, 3.6 and above

Features

  • Adapters for various http libraries like requests, urlfetch, aiohttp (requires Python >= 3.5.3) and tornado.
  • WebHook validation
  • Signature generation for socket subscriptions

Table of Contents

Installation

You can install this module using your package management method or choice, normally easy_install or pip. For example:

pip install pusher

Users on Python 2.x and older versions of pip may get a warning, due to pip compiling the optional pusher.aiohttp module, which uses Python 3 syntax. However, as pusher.aiohttp is not used by default, this does not affect the library's functionality. See our Github issue, as well as this issue from Gunicorn for more details.

On Linux, you must ensure that OpenSSL is installed, e.g. on Debian/Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential libssl-dev libffi-dev

Getting started

The minimum configuration required to use the Pusher object are the three constructor arguments which identify your Pusher Channels app. You can find them by going to "API Keys" on your app at https://app.pusher.com.

import pusher
pusher_client = pusher.Pusher(app_id=u'4', key=u'key', secret=u'secret', cluster=u'cluster')

You can then trigger events to channels. Channel and event names may only contain alphanumeric characters, - and _:

pusher_client.trigger(u'a_channel', u'an_event', {u'some': u'data'})

Configuration

import pusher
pusher_client = pusher.Pusher(app_id, key, secret, cluster=u'cluster')
Argument Description
app_id String Required
The Pusher Channels application ID
key String Required
The Pusher Channels application key
secret String Required
The Pusher Channels application secret token
cluster String Default:mt1
The pusher application cluster. Will be overwritten if host is set
host String Default:None
The host to connect to
port int Default:None
Which port to connect to
ssl bool Default:True
Use HTTPS
encryption_master_key String Default:None
Deprecated, see encryption_master_key_base64
encryption_master_key_base64 String Default:None
The encryption master key for End-to-end Encryption
backend Object an object that responds to the send_request(request) method. If none is provided, a pusher.requests.RequestsBackend instance is created.
json_encoder Object Default: None
Custom JSON encoder.
json_decoder Object Default: None
Custom JSON decoder.

The constructor will throw a TypeError if it is called with parameters that don’t match the types listed above.

Example
import pusher
pusher_client = pusher.Pusher(app_id=u'4', key=u'key', secret=u'secret', ssl=True, cluster=u'cluster')

Triggering Events

To trigger an event on one or more channels, use the trigger method on the Pusher object.

Pusher::trigger

Argument Description
channels String or Collection Required
The name or list of names of the channel you wish to trigger events on
event String Required
The name of the event you wish to trigger.
data JSONable data Required
The event's payload
socket_id String Default:None
The socket_id of the connection you wish to exclude from receiving the event. You can read more here.
Return Values Description
buffered_events Dict A parsed response that includes the event_id for each event published to a channel. See example.

Pusher::trigger will throw a TypeError if called with parameters of the wrong type; or a ValueError if called on more than 100 channels, with an event name longer than 200 characters, or with more than 10240 characters of data (post JSON serialisation).

Example

This call will trigger to 'a_channel' and 'another_channel', and exclude the recipient with socket_id "1234.12".

pusher_client.trigger([u'a_channel', u'another_channel'], u'an_event', {u'some': u'data'}, "1234.12")

Pusher::trigger_batch

It's also possible to send distinct messages in batches to limit the overhead of HTTP headers. There is a current limit of 10 events per batch on our multi-tenant clusters.

Argument Description
batch Array of Dict Required
A list of events to trigger

Events are a Dict with keys:

Argument Description
channel String Required
The name of the channel to publish to.
name String Required
The name of the event you wish to trigger.
data JSONable data Required
The event's payload
socket_id String Default:None
The socket_id of the connection you wish to exclude from receiving the event. You can read more here.
Return Values Description
Dict An empty dict on success

Pusher::trigger_batch will throw a TypeError if the data parameter is not JSONable.

Example
pusher_client.trigger_batch([
  { u'channel': u'a_channel', u'name': u'an_event', u'data': {u'some': u'data'}, u'socket_id': '1234.12'},
  { u'channel': u'a_channel', u'name': u'an_event', u'data': {u'some': u'other data'}}
])

Querying Application State

Getting Information For All Channels

Pusher::channels_info

Argument Description
prefix_filter String Default: None
Filter the channels returned by their prefix
attributes Collection Default: []
A collection of attributes which should be returned for each channel. If empty, an empty dictionary of attributes will be returned for each channel.
Available attributes: "user_count".
Return Values Description
channels Dict A parsed response from the HTTP API. See example.

Pusher::channels_info will throw a TypeError if prefix_filter is not a String.

Example
channels = pusher_client.channels_info(u"presence-", [u'user_count'])

#=> {u'channels': {u'presence-chatroom': {u'user_count': 2}, u'presence-notifications': {u'user_count': 1}}}

Getting Information For A Specific Channel

Pusher::channel_info

Argument Description
channel String Required
The name of the channel you wish to query
attributes Collection Default: []
A collection of attributes to be returned for the channel.

Available attributes:
"user_count" : Number of distinct users currently subscribed. Applicable only to presence channels.
"subscription_count": Number of connections currently subscribed to the channel. Enable this feature in your Pusher dashboard's App Settings.
Return Values Description
channel Dict A parsed response from the HTTP API. See example.

Pusher::channel_info will throw a ValueError if channel is not a valid channel.

Example
channel = pusher_client.channel_info(u'presence-chatroom', [u"user_count"])
#=> {u'user_count': 42, u'occupied': True}

Getting User Information For A Presence Channel

Pusher::users_info

Argument Description
channel String Required
The name of the presence channel you wish to query
Return Values Description
users Dict A parsed response from the HTTP API. See example.

Pusher::users_info will throw a ValueError if channel is not a valid channel.

Example
pusher_client.users_info(u'presence-chatroom')
#=> {u'users': [{u'id': u'1035'}, {u'id': u'4821'}]}

Authenticating Channel Subscription

Pusher::authenticate

In order for users to subscribe to a private- or presence-channel, they must be authenticated by your server.

The client will make a POST request to an endpoint (either "/pusher/auth" or any which you specify) with a body consisting of the channel's name and socket_id.

Using your Pusher instance, with which you initialized Pusher, you can generate an authentication signature. Having responded to the request with this signature, the subscription will be authenticated.

Argument Description
channel String Required
The name of the channel, sent to you in the POST request
socket_id String Required
The channel's socket_id, also sent to you in the POST request
custom_data Dict Required for presence channels
This will be a dictionary containing the data you want associated with a member of a presence channel. A "user_id" key is required, and you can optionally pass in a "user_info" key. See the example below.
Return Values Description
response Dict A dictionary to send as a response to the authentication request.

Pusher::authenticate will throw a ValueError if the channel or socket_id that it’s called with are invalid.

Example
Private Channels
auth = pusher_client.authenticate(

  channel=u"private-channel",

  socket_id=u"1234.12"
)
# return `auth` as a response
Presence Channels
auth = pusher_client.authenticate(

  channel=u"presence-channel",

  socket_id=u"1234.12",

  custom_data={
    u'user_id': u'1',
    u'user_info': {
      u'twitter': '@pusher'
    }
  }
)
# return `auth` as a response

Terminating user connections

TIn order to terminate a user's connections, the user must have been authenticated. Check the Server user authentication docs for the information on how to create a user authentication endpoint.

To terminate all connections established by a given user, you can use the terminate_user_connections function:

pusher_client.terminate_user_connections(userId)

Please note, that it only terminates the user's active connections. This means, if nothing else is done, the user will be able to reconnect. For more information see: Terminating user connections docs.

End to End Encryption

This library supports end to end encryption of your private channels. This means that only you and your connected clients will be able to read your messages. Pusher cannot decrypt them. You can enable this feature by following these steps:

  1. You should first set up Private channels. This involves creating an authentication endpoint on your server.

  2. Next, generate a 32 byte master encryption key, base64 encode it and store it securely.

    This is secret and you should never share this with anyone. Not even Pusher.

    To generate a suitable key from a secure random source, you could use:

    openssl rand -base64 32
  3. Pass your master key to the SDK constructor

    import pusher
    
    pusher_client = pusher.Pusher(
      app_id='yourappid',
      key='yourkey',
      secret='yoursecret',
      encryption_master_key_base64='<output from command above>',
      cluster='yourclustername',
      ssl=True
    )
    
    pusher_client.trigger('private-encrypted-my-channel', 'my-event', {
      'message': 'hello world'
    })
  4. Channels where you wish to use end to end encryption must be prefixed with private-encrypted-.

  5. Subscribe to these channels in your client, and you're done! You can verify it is working by checking out the debug console on the https://dashboard.pusher.com/ and seeing the scrambled ciphertext.

Important note: This will not encrypt messages on channels that are not prefixed by private-encrypted-.

More info on End-to-end Encrypted Channels here.

Receiving Webhooks

If you have webhooks set up to POST a payload to a specified endpoint, you may wish to validate that these are actually from Pusher. The Pusher object achieves this by checking the authentication signature in the request body using your application credentials.

Pusher::validate_webhook

Argument Description
key String Required
Pass in the value sent in the request headers under the key "X-PUSHER-KEY". The method will check this matches your app key.
signature String Required
This is the value in the request headers under the key "X-PUSHER-SIGNATURE". The method will verify that this is the result of signing the request body against your app secret.
body String Required
The JSON string of the request body received.
Return Values Description
body_data Dict If validation was successful, the return value will be the parsed payload. Otherwise, it will be None.

Pusher::validate_webhook will raise a TypeError if it is called with any parameters of the wrong type.

Example
webhook = pusher_client.validate_webhook(

  key="key_sent_in_header",

  signature="signature_sent_in_header",

  body="{ \"time_ms\": 1327078148132  \"events\": [ { \"name\": \"event_name\", \"some\": \"data\" }  ]}"
)

print webhook["events"]

Request Library Configuration

Users can configure the library to use different backends to send calls to our API. The HTTP libraries we support are:

  • Requests (pusher.requests.RequestsBackend). This is used by default.
  • Tornado (pusher.tornado.TornadoBackend).
  • AsyncIO (pusher.aiohttp.AsyncIOBackend).
  • Google App Engine (pusher.gae.GAEBackend).

Upon initializing a Pusher instance, pass in any of these options to the backend keyword argument.

Google App Engine

GAE users are advised to use the pusher.gae.GAEBackend backend to ensure compatability.

Feature Support

Feature Supported
Trigger event on single channel
Trigger event on multiple channels
Excluding recipients from events
Authenticating private channels
Authenticating presence channels
Get the list of channels in an application
Get the state of a single channel
Get a list of users in a presence channel
WebHook validation
Terminate user connections
Heroku add-on support
Debugging & Logging
Cluster configuration
Timeouts
HTTPS
End-to-end Encryption
HTTP Proxy configuration
HTTP KeepAlive

Helper Functionality

These are helpers that have been implemented to to ensure interactions with the HTTP API only occur if they will not be rejected e.g. channel naming conventions.

Helper Functionality Supported
Channel name validation
Limit to 100 channels per trigger
Limit event name length to 200 chars

Running the tests

To run the tests run python setup.py test

License

Copyright (c) 2015 Pusher Ltd. See LICENSE for details.