i'm thinking about using Firebase for the notification service that my app needs. However, its important that the process of sending notifications is secure. I want to avoid a notification being sent from any member of the team without permission.
One way could be assigning restricted roles and permissions for the team members. However it also would be good to have any kind of activity log in the console, or have a log of all notifications sent including the name of the user. The console currently allows you to see all notifications sent, but i cannot see who sent it, and also the notification can be deleted from the log.
Any ideas on how to manage this? Which specific roles would you recommend me to use? Is it possible with Firebase?
You could write a function in Firebase which sends notifications, and you have logs on that function. Here is how to write a function which send notifications
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I want to let my customers send push notifications to their users. I am using Firebase Admin SDK for that, which requires the "service-account.json" file. For security reasons this file should not be shared with others. How could I make this feature available to my customers, without sharing any "secret" information?
If you want to allow your users to send push notifications, you'll have to make a custom API endpoint that you can call from the application they use. It's quite common to use Cloud Functions or Cloud Run for this, but any trusted environment you may already have can work too.
By running the code that sends the message in an environment only you can access, allows you to securely use the Admin SDK that has full administrative access to your Firebase project.
Then when this code gets a request from a user running your app, it needs to check whether this user is authorized to send this message to the user(s) they are trying to send this to. Exactly how to check authorization depends on your app, but some things to consider:
Is any user allowed to send a message to any other user, or is there some mechanism where they opt-in to receiving messages from each other?
Can any message be sent, or is there some mechanism that validates the messages, for example by detecting whether any foul language is used?
These are just some examples of the types of checks you might want to do, and the actual list completely depends on your app and its use-cases.
hello I'm new to flutter and trying to get push notification in flutter , I have successfully subscribed the user to a topic and sent a notification through the firebase console by topic , what I'm trying to do is to have a button for admins in the app and when they post for a particular topic the users with that topic get the notification I have heard about cloud functions but I don't know exactly where to start ! i hope I made my point ! I have seen some videos that talks about type script but is there is any workaround this ?
The Firebase documentation names notifying the user when something interesting happens as an example use-case. From there:
Developers can use Cloud Functions to keep users engaged and up to date with relevant information about an app. Consider, for example, an app that allows users to follow one another's activities in the app. Each time a user adds themselves as a follower of another user, a write occurs in the Realtime Database. Then this write event could trigger a function to create Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) notifications to let the appropriate users know that they have gained new followers.
The function triggers on writes to the Realtime Database path where followers are stored.
The function composes a message to send via FCM.
FCM sends the notification message to the user's device.
To review working code, see Send FCM notifications.
In Urban Airship, when I am composing a notification, I can target specific users by searching for a Urban Airship channel_id (device ID):
I sent from Urban Airship the push notification that I am showing above, and I received it successfully. Now I want to do the same thing, send a push notification to a specific device, but now using the Firebase console. The problem is that in Firebase, in the step where I need to specify the target, it only allows me to choose User segment or topic. I was expecting to see a third option: Target specific users (for sending notifications to one or many specific GCM/FCM device token IDs. So my alternative is to add a GCM/FCM device token ID to a topic and then send the push notification to that topic, which is something that I have successfully done before. Nonetheless, that would be a workaround and not the way I would prefer to do this. Is it possible to send push notifications to specific users (by defining the target GCM/FCM device token IDs) from the Firebase console? Thank you.
UPDATE 1: See how the Firebase console (https://console.firebase.google.com/) only shows User segment and Topic as the Target:
First Step:
Second Step:
Third Step:
By design, the notification feature in the console is for sending out broadcast-type events. Sending user-specific alerts would be more of a programmatic operation done through the API.
For sending test messages, there is a console tool for this, explained here.
Note that it is possible to send a notification to one device by subscribing a device to any topic and sending the notification to that topic in the console (keep in mind topics are public and you can't prevent users from signing up to them; fine for testing most likely).
Another alternative is to send a message via HTTP or curl. Perhaps the best resource for this is the quickstart/messaging example.
I have made an app with the use of firebase. It is basically a chat application in which you van send and receive the text and images. I want to add a functionality in it that whenever a user sends a msg, then another user should get a notification . When I try to send a notification through the firebase console, then it is working, but when a user messages through the app, then it is not showing any notification to another user. So, can anyone tell me that how can this functionality be achieved ?Also, provide some sample code to see how things are working
You need to use cloud functions for that:
https://firebase.google.com/docs/functions
Cloud Functions for Firebase lets you automatically run backend code in response to events triggered by Firebase features and HTTPS requests
First, you can register the user to a topic:
FirebaseMessaging.getInstance().subscribeToTopic("news");
https://firebase.google.com/docs/cloud-messaging/android/topic-messaging
Then when the message is sent to the database, you can use onWrite() in cloud functions which is a database trigger to be able to send the notification.
https://firebase.google.com/docs/functions/database-events
I know that Firebase has recently added support for Push Notifications and while this is a great thing, I only seem to be able to send push notifications manually via the Notifications Panel.
What I'd like to do is to send push notifications within a user scope...Let me explain that. Each User in my App has an account and then each user can join a group. Within this group the user can perform tasks and has a list of chores to do. Now when certain tasks are due for example I want to remind the user of doing it with a push notification. For 1-10 I might be able to pull this off manually, but is there a way to dynamically based on the data in the Database send out Push Notifications?
I know that certain Push Notifications can be created using the Analytics tool such as "Hey you have not visited for 3 days, please come back whatever"... but I'd like to register push notifications such as "I just created a task, this task needs to be done within 3 days. Remind me in 3 days if the task is still not done".
Is this possible with Firebase or do I need to have my own server connecting to Firebase and handling those events?
-xCoder
You need to implement FCM in your client and in a server. Let me put this straight:
First, you need that your client, or app, to register into FCM and get a FCM token that will be used to identify that device uniquely.
Then, store that token wherever you like. It can be into firebase database or other server you may like. I recommend you to store it into firebase if you are using it as a database for your users; that's my case.
Also, you need to implement a http or xmpp server in order to send FCM messages to your registered devices containing the data you are interested in. For example, you can implement a Google App Engine endpoint (can be done with Android Studio and Java) that is quite simple or a NodeJS module, depending on your preferred language.
If you are using Firebase as database you can connect from your server with the appropriate SDK and get the FCM tokens you want from your users, and then send the message to those with data. Don't forget to secure your serve.
The way you implement your server algorithm to send FCM messages depends on your app purposes.
Hope it is clear enough for you. Also you can find all the documentation with a short video that explains the general structure here: https://firebase.google.com/docs/cloud-messaging
You can use cloud functions to trigger on any create, update or delete operation in your database and in the trigger event, you can choose to send in FCM push notifications to the devices of your choice.
Here is the documentation regarding the use and structure of a cloud function: https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/extend-with-functions
Hope this helps!