Lerner is based around the concept of webhooks, push notifications sent via HTTP POST requests. Webhooks are great if you have a server that can accept POST requests, but what if you want to receive push notifications on a phone or a computer on a wifi connection. To receive push notifications under there conditions, you need to go beyond HTTP and use a protocol that supports persistent connections.
Notistream achieves this using the Redis Pub/Sub protocol. A server, reimplementing Redis Pub/Sub, allows clients to open persistent connections and subscribe to channels. A webserver receives webhooks via POST requests and then publishes the information to the Pub/Sub server. Connected clients will then see the notification on their desktop/phone/whatever.
To install the client, just do python setup.py install.
The command to run the client is lerner. The first time you run it,
the program will ask you to enter info for a configuration file.
It will ask you for host, port, and channels. Host is the hostname of the Pub/Sub server. Port is its port (defaulting to Redis's default port of 6379). Channels is a comma-separated list of the channels to which you would like to subscribe.
To send a webhook notification, make a post request to the root url of the webserver. The parameters of the request should be "channel", which would be the channel to which the message will be sent, and "message", which would be the body of the message. For instance, to send the message "hello" to channel1, you could do
curl -d "message=hello&channel=channel1" http://yourserver.com/
To get github notifications, enter the url of /github on the webserver as a post-receive hook to the repo. Notifications will be posted to the channel username/reponame.
To get SMS notifications from Twilio, enter the url of /twilio on the webserver as the SMS url on your Twilio account. The channel to which notifications will be posted will be your Twilio number (no dashes or parens, just the digits).
Change directory into the "server" directory. To install all dependencies, run
pip install -r requirements.txt
To run the server, run the startserver.sh script.
If you only want to start the webserver, type
./startserver.sh web
If you only want to start the pub/sub server, type
./startserver.sh pubsub
To start both servers, run the script with no arguments.
Lerner is released under an MIT License, reproduced in LICENSE