rocket-push-gateway

A Push Notification Gateway to be used with Rocket.chat

What

We use the excellent open source project Rocket.chat, and this project here is to work with it, to facilitate sending its iOS and Android Push Notifications.

You may want to use this if:

• You have network constraints: due to our internal security constraints, we can't host the Rocket server on a network with direct access to the Internet, so we need to use a gateway to send the Push notifications to our in-house built iOS and Android apps.

• If you develop your own app, and want other servers to be able to use it, with push, then you need to setup your own gateway, and allow them to use it. You should probably setup a SSL terminating proxy (Apache, nginx, F5, AWS ELB, etc) in front of this gateway, in this particular scenario.

• You host your own server, but you also want to use the official Rocket.chat mobile apps, in addition to your own apps (some folks don't want the internal MDM on their phones, contractors, temps, etc), so you need a place to send the notifications to your own apps using your keys, but also forward a copy to Rocket's Push Gateway (this may require a subscription from them).

You don't really need this if:

• You Rocket servers have direct access to the Internet
  • If you use your own apps, simply add your iOS certificate and FCM server key and push away
  • If you use Rocket's mobile apps, then you need to use their Push Gateway, likely with a subscription.

Build & Run

This project depends on node.js and possibly Docker or something like PM2 to run it on the shell.

Docker

• To use Docker, simply use the included docker-compose.yml file:

• build the container docker-compose build

• run it docker-compose up

• if you prefer the manual steps:

• build the container docker build -t rocket-push-gateway:latest .

  • if you prefer, you can pull my public image docker pull alvarow/rocket-push-gateway:latest

• run it docker run -d --rm --name rocket-push-gateway -p 0.0.0.0:11000:11000 -e LOG_LEVEL=error -e NODE=${NODE_CONFIG} rocket-push-gateway:latest

Good old shell

To use on shell, with PM2, screen or systemd, you'll need node.js, I used v14.5.x, but it should work on any reasonably new LTS version.

• see https://nodejs.org/en/download/package-manager/ to get node.js installed

• install the app dependencies npm ci

• run it manually npm start

  • optionally install PM2 and run it through that (see details). npm install pm2@latest -g pm2 start app.js --name rocket-push-gateway pm2 stop rocket-push-gateway

Usage & Tips

The config/ folder has a default.js that you can override in the various ways, see https://github.com/lorenwest/node-config for details. In short:

• either:

  • Configuration file place a file in the config/ folder:

    • local.js # overrides to defaults that's always loaded if present
    • development.js # overrides to defaults when NODE_ENV=development
    • production.js # overrides to defaults when NODE_ENV=production

  • Environment variables I prefer this, especially with Docker, just set the following:

    • PORT # this defaults to 11000
    • LOG_LEVEL # defaults to info. pick: debug, info, warning, error
    • NODE_CONFIG # this is a single line version of the config file, with the options you want different from the defaults

See contrib/ folder for a sample systemd service, a sample NODE_CONFIG value and a PM2 service configuration.

Disclaimer of Warranty

The software is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind, express or implied. For details, please see LICENSE.md