Push your Drupal Site’s Events to your Phone with Pushover

In this article I am going to show you how you can integrate Pushover with your Drupal site. I will illustrate a couple of examples of how you can use Pushover to notify yourself as soon as something happens on your site.

The code I write in this article is also available in this repository so you can just clone that if you want to follow along.

What is Pushover?

Pushover is a web and mobile application that allows you to get real time notifications on your mobile device. The way it works is that you install an app on your Android or Apple device and using a handy API you can send that app notifications. The great thing about this is that it happens more or less in real time (depending on your internet connection) as Pushover uses the Google and Apple servers to send the notifications.

The price is also very affordable. At a rate of $4.99 USD per platform (Android, Apple or desktop) paid only once, you can use it on any number of devices under that platform. And you also get a 5 day trial period for free the moment you create your account.

What am I doing here?

In this article I am going to set up a Pushover application and use it from my Drupal site to notify my phone of various events. I will give you two example use cases that Pushover can be handy with:

• Whenever an anonymous user posts a comment that awaits administrative approval, I’ll send a notification to my phone
• Whenever the admin user 1 logs into the site, I’ll send an emergency notification to my phone (useful if you are the only user of that admin account).

Naturally, these are examples and you may not find them useful. But they only serve as illustration of the power you can have by using Pushover.

Pushover account

First, a quick look at creating your Pushover account. To follow along, go on over to Pushover and sign up if you haven’t already and you can start your 5 day free trial. Then, go to Google Play or the App Store and install the app on your device. You’ll need to log in to your account and give the device a name. Mine is called simply Nexus (hint: I don’t have an iPhone).

Go back then to the Pushover website and you can already test it out by sending yourself a test notification to one or all of your active devices. You can even specify which sound it should make.

Next, if you want to use the API, you’ll need to create an application. This will generate for you an app_token to use later on. And that should be pretty much it.

Drupal

Now that the Pushover account creation is taken care of, the device app is installed (Android in my case) and I have my Pushover application, it’s time to see how I can achieve the goal set out in the beginning. As a brief roadmap, I will do the following:

• Create a custom Drupal module
• Add to it the Pushover class created by Chris Schalenborgh (a handy wrapper over the curl calls to the API)
• Implement some hooks that will trigger the notifications based on certain conditions
• Profit

The custom module I’ll be working with in this example is called pushover and it contains a pushover.info and a pushover.module file (as required). Additionally, I will create a lib/Pushover folder in it to store the external class I will use to connect to Pushover. There are other – more recommended ways – of importing external libraries into Drupal modules (see the Libraries API), but for the sake of brevity, this will work just fine.

The first thing I want to do in my pushover.module file is to import this external class. Based on my folder structure, I can do so with this line:

require_once(DRUPAL_ROOT . '/' . drupal_get_path('module', 'pushover') . '/lib/Pushover/Pushover.php');

Next, I want to create a reusable helper function that will return a pushable object. That is an object already populated with my own defaults (such as credentials) and that takes some parameters for the more common properties. But first, I want to put my Pushover account credentials into the settings.php file because they do not belong in my git repository:

$conf['pushover_credentials'] = array(
  'user_token' => 'uCpygdjfsndfi7233sdasdo33Yv',
  'app_token' => 'aKH8Nwsdasdanl342jmsdaBWgoVe',
);

Obviously neither of these tokens are now valid but if you are following along, you should replace them with yours: the user_token you get on the main page as you log in to the Pushover website and the app_token is the one generated for your application.

Then I can continue with my helper function I mentioned earlier:

/**
 * Helper function that returns a pushable object using the Pushover class
 * 
 * @param $vars
 * @return bool|Pushover
 */
function pushover_get_pushable($vars) {
  global $conf;
  if (isset($conf['pushover_credentials'])) {
    $push = new Pushover();
    $push->setToken($conf['pushover_credentials']['app_token']);
    $push->setUser($conf['pushover_credentials']['user_token']);
    $push->setTitle($vars['title']);
    $push->setMessage($vars['message']);
    if (isset($vars['url'])) {
      $push->setUrl($vars['url']);
    }
    if (isset($vars['device'])) {
      $push->setDevice($vars['device']);
    }
    $push->setTimestamp(time());

    return $push;
  }
  else {
    return FALSE;
  }
}

In this function I instantiate a new Pushover object if there are credentials in my settings.php file. Otherwise, I fail silently by returning false. The function takes some parameters that are set on the object: title and message are mandatory whereas the url and device are not. The device is actually the name of the device to which you want to restrict this notification.

Additionally, I set the current timestamp and then return the object.

Next, it’s time to use this function inside some hooks. The first one is going to be hook_comment_insert():

/**
 * Implements hook_comment_insert().
 */
function pushover_comment_insert($comment) {

  // Send a push notification if a new comment is created by an anonymous user
  // and it is not yet published.
  if ($comment->status == 0 && $comment->is_anonymous == TRUE) {
    global $base_url;
    $vars = array(
      'title' => 'New comment on ' . variable_get('site_name') . '!',
      'message' => 'Subject: ' . $comment->subject,
      'url' => $base_url . '/node/' . $comment->nid . '#comment-' . $comment->cid,
      'device' => 'Nexus'
    );
    $pushable = pushover_get_pushable($vars);
    if ($pushable) {
      $pushed = $pushable->send();
      if ($pushed == false) {
        watchdog('Pushover', t('A comment has been created but there was an error pushing that over.'), array(), WATCHDOG_ERROR, NULL);
      }
    }
  }
}

In here I check if the commenter is anonymous and the status is 0 (to be on the safe side). If that’s the case, I build the array of parameters for my helper function with some information about the site and comment and use the send() method to send the notification. You’ll notice that I restricted this to the Nexus device.

At the end, I check whether the notification went out successfully (the send() method returns false if the Pushover service does not return the success status code of 1. If something went wrong, I quickly log it to the watchdog.

So now if an anonymous user writes a comment, I get a push notification with the site name, comment subject and URL. Nifty.

Now let’s turn to the second example in which I implement an emergency notification if my admin user logs into the site. If it’s not me, I’ll know something is wrong and I probably got hacked. I do this inside a hook_user_login() implementation:

/**
 * Implements hook_user_login().
 */
function pushover_user_login(&$edit, $account) {
  // If the admin user logs in, send a push notification.
  if ($account->uid == 1) {
    $whitelist = array('1.1.1.1');
    if (!in_array(ip_address(), $whitelist)) {
      global $base_url;
      $vars = array(
        'title' => 'Admin user sign in',
        'message' => 'Admin user has logged into this site: ' . variable_get('site_name') . '!',
        'url' => $base_url,
      );
      $pushable = pushover_get_pushable($vars);
      if ($pushable) {
        $pushable->setPriority(2);
        $pushable->setRetry(30);
        $pushable->setExpire(60);
        $pushed = $pushable->send();
        if ($pushed == false) {
          watchdog('Pushover', t('An admin user has logged into the site but there was an error pushing this over.'), array(), WATCHDOG_ERROR, NULL);
        }
      }
    }
  }
} 

In here, I first check if the user logging in is the one with the id of 1 (the main admin user). Then I create an array with whitelisted IPs to check against the user logging in. I don’t want to get notified if I log in from home or from the office (1.1.1.1 is just an example ip address).

Then just like before, I get my pushable object with the usual variables (no device this time, I want this to go out to all my devices). On top of those, I set a priority of 2 (marking it an emergency notification), a retry value of 30 seconds and an expire value of 60 seconds. The latter 2 in combination with the priority make it so that if left unacknowledged by my phone, the notification gets resent every 30 seconds for a total duration of 60 seconds. For more information about the possible options you have with Pushover, make sure you check out their API docs.

And there it is. I will now get an emergency notification if someone logs in with my admin account. Of course, not very good if many people can log in with that account, but you get the point.

Conclusion

In this tutorial I showed you how you can use Pushover from your Drupal site to send notifications to your phone when certain events occur. I covered 2 examples but I’m sure you can find more. I would like to also mention that I found a contrib Drupal module called Pushover which uses Rules in order to send out Pushover notifications. I haven’t really used it, but make sure to check it out if you want to use Pushover and your site is already making use of the Rules module. Or, you know, you hate writing code.