Masonite Notifications

Introduction

Masonite Notifications can easily add new notification sending semantics for your Masonite project. These notifications could be sending an email or a slack message. This package is designed to be extremely simple and modular so allow new notification abilities to be added to it through third party integrations.

Installation

In order to get started using Masonite Notifications, we first have to pip install it:

$ pip install masonite-notifications

And then add the provider to our PROVIDERS list:

from notifications.providers import NotificationProvider
...

PROVIDERS = [
    ...
    NotificationProvider,
    ...
]

Thats it! Let's see how it works!

Usage

There are a few concepts we'll need to cover so you can fully understand how Notifications work. First we will cover the high level stuff and then slowly work down into the lower level implementations. For the purposes of this documentation, we will walk through how to setup a welcome notification so we can send an email when a user signs up.

Creating a Notification

In order to use it we can create a notification class. We can do this simply with a new craft command.

$ craft notification WelcomeNotification

This will create a notification in the app/notifications directory. Feel free to move it wherever you like though.

This will create a class like so:

''' A WelcomeNotification Notification '''
from notifications import Notifiable

class WelcomeNotification(Notifiable):

    def mail(self):
        pass

Building Our Mail Notification

Let's now walk through how to build a notification so we can send the email to our user.

Since our notification inherits from Notifiable, we have access to a few methods we will use to build the notification. We'll show a final product of what it looks like since it's pretty straight forward but we'll walk through it after:

from notifications import Notifiable
import os


class WelcomeNotification(Notifiable):

    def mail(self):
        return self.subject('New account signup!') \
            .driver('smtp') \
            .panel('GBALeague.com') \
            .heading('You have created a new account!') \
            .line('We greatly value your service!') \
            .line('Attached is an invoice for your recent purchase') \
            .action('Sign Back In', href="http://gbaleague.com") \
            .line('See you soon! Game on!') \
            .view('/notifications/snippets/mail/heading',
                  {'message': 'Welcome To The GBA!'})

Notice here we are calling a few methods such as driver, panel, line, etc. If we send this message it will look like:

Not bad. We can use this logic to easily build up emails into a nice format simply.

Options

Let's walk through the different options to build an email notification and what they do.

Method	Description	Example
.line()	Creates a single line of text like text you would see in a paragraph tag	line('this is a line of text')
.action()	This creates a clickable looking button. The kwargs include href and style. The styles are bootstraps button styles to include default, success, danger, info etc.	action('Click Me', href="http://google.com", style="danger")
.view()	This is the normal view object here so you can pass in any templates and dictionary you need.	.view('mail/header', {'key': 'value'})
.panel()	This creates a grey background header panel.	.panel('Some Header')
.heading()	Creates a header	.heading('Welcome!')
.subject()	The subject of the email	.subject('New Account!')
.dry()	Sets all the necessary fields but does not actually send the email. This is great for testing purposes. This takes no parameters	.dry()
.driver()	The driver you want to use to send the email	.driver('mailgun')

Sending the Notification

Now that we have built our notification above, we can send it in our controller (or anywhere else we like):

from app.notifications.WelcomeNotification import WelcomeNotification
...

def show(self, Notify):

    Notify.mail(WelcomeNotification, to='[e-mail]')

Notice here we simply specified the Notify class in the parameter list and we are able to pass in our awesome new WelcomeNotification into the mail method.

NOTE: The method you should use on the notify class should correspond to the method on the notification class. So for example if we want to execute the slack method on the WelcomeNotification then we would call :

Notify.slack(WelcomeNotification)

The method you call should be the same as the method you want to call on the notification class. The Notify class actually doesn't contain any methods but will call the same method on the notification class as you called on the Notify class.

Building Our Slack Notification

Out of the box, Masonite notifications comes with Slack support as well in case we want to send a message to a specific slack group.

NOTE: In order to use this feature fully, you'll need to generate a token from Slack. This token should have at minimum the channels:read, chat:write:bot, chat:write:user and files:write:user permission scopes. If your token does not have these scopes then parts of this feature will not work.

Going back to our WelcomeNotification, we can simply specify a new method called slack.

class WelcomeNotification(Notifiable):

    def mail(self):
        return self.subject('New account signup!') \
            .driver('smtp') \
            .panel('GBALeague.com') \
            .heading('You have created a new account!') \
            .line('We greatly value your service!') \
            .line('Attached is an invoice for your recent purchase') \
            .action('Sign Back In', href="http://gbaleague.com") \
            .line('See you soon! Game on!') \
            .view('/notifications/snippets/mail/heading',
                  {'message': 'Welcome To The GBA!'})
      
      def slack(self):
          pass

Notice the new slack method at the bottom. we will use this method to build our slack notification. Again we will show you a full example and then run through all the methods:

class WelcomeNotification(Notifiable):

    def mail(self):
        return self.subject('New account signup!') \
            .driver('smtp') \
            .panel('GBALeague.com') \
            .heading('You have created a new account!') \
            .line('We greatly value your service!') \
            .line('Attached is an invoice for your recent purchase') \
            .action('Sign Back In', href="http://gbaleague.com") \
            .line('See you soon! Game on!') \
            .view('/notifications/snippets/mail/heading',
                  {'message': 'Welcome To The GBA!'})
      
    def slack(self):
        return self.token(os.getenv('BOT')) \
            .text('Masonite Notification: Read The Docs!, https://docs.masoniteproject.com/') \
            .channel('#bot') \
            .as_user('Masonite Bot') \
            .icon(':fire:') \
            .button('Sure!', "https://docs.masoniteproject.com/")

Options

Method	Description	Example
.token()	This is your Slack token that has the correct permission scopes.	.token('xoxp-359926262626-35...')
.text()	The text you want to show in the message	.text('Welcome to Masonite!')
.channel()	The channel you want to broadcast to. If the value you supply starts with a # sign then Notifications will make a POST request with your token to the Slack channel list API and get the channel ID. You can specify the channel ID directly if you don't want this behavior	.channel('#general') .channel('CHSUU862')
.as_user()	The username you want to show as the message	.as_user('Masonite Bot')
.icon()	The icon you want to show. This needs to be a Slack emoji	.icon(':fire:')
.as_current_user()	This sets a boolean value to True on whether the message should show as the currently authenticated user.	.as_current_user()
.without_markdown()	This will not parse any markdown in the message. This is a boolean value and requires no parameters.	.without_markdown()
.dont_unfurl()	This sets a boolean to False on whether the message should show any attachments. Usually slack will show an icon of the website when posting a link. This disables that feature for the current message.	.dont_unfurl()
.as_snippet()	Used to post the current message as a snippet instead of as a normal message. This option has 3 keyword arguments. The file_type, name, and title. This uses a different API endpoint so some previous methods may not be used.	.as_snippet(file_type='python', name='snippet', title='Awesome Snippet')
.comment()	Only used when using the .as_snippet() method. This will set a comment on the snippet.	.comment('Great Snippet')
.button()	Used to create action buttons under a message. This requires text and a url but can also contain style, and confirm	.button('Sure!', 'http://google.com', style='primary', confirm='Are you sure?')
.dry()	Sets all the necessary fields but does not actually send the email. This is great for testing purposes. This takes no parameters	.dry()

Sending a Slack Notification

Now that we have built our notification above, we can send it in our controller (or anywhere else we like):

from app.notifications.WelcomeNotification import WelcomeNotification
...

def show(self, Notify):

    Notify.slack(WelcomeNotification)

Notice here we simply specified the Notify class in the parameter list and we are able to pass in our awesome new WelcomeNotification into the slack method.

Building Integrations

The Notifiable class is very modular and you are able to build custom integrations if you like pretty simply. In this section we'll walk through how to create what are called Components.

What are Components?

Components are classes that can be added to a Notification class that extend the behavior of the notification. In fact, the Notifiable class is just a simple abstraction of two different components. Let's look at the signature of the class that we have been inheriting from.

from notifications.components import MailComponent, SlackComponent


class Notifiable(MailComponent, SlackComponent):
    pass

The Component classes are the classes that have our methods we have been using. If you'd like to see the source code on those components you can check them out on GitHub to get a lower level understanding on how they work.

Creating a Component

Let's walk through a bit on how we created our MailComponent by creating a simplified version of it. First let's create a simple class:

class MailComponent:
    pass

Now let's add a line and a subject method to it:

class MailComponent:
    
    def line(self, message):
        pass
    
    def subject(self, subject)
        pass

and let's use these two methods to build a template attribute

class MailComponent:

    template = ''
    
    def line(self, message):
        self.template += template
        return self
    
    def subject(self, subject)
        self._subject = subject
        return self

Since we returned self we can keep appending onto the notification class like we have been.

The actual MailComponent class is a bit more complex than this but we'll keep this simple for explanatory purposes.

The Fire Method

Whenever we insert the notification into the Notify class:

Notify.mail(WelcomeNotification)

This will call the mail method on the notification class (or whatever other method we called on the Notify class).

Once that is returned then it will call the fire_mail method which you will specify in your component.

If you are created a discord notification then you should have a fire_discord method on your component and you will call it using Notify.discord(WelcomeNotification).

Since we want to call the mail method on it, we will create a fire_mail method:

class MailComponent:

    template = ''
    
    def line(self, message):
        self.template += template
        return self
    
    def subject(self, subject)
        self._subject = subject
        return self
    
    def fire_mail(self):
        pass

Passing Data With Protected Members

Sometimes you will want to pass in data into the fire_mail method. In order to keep this simple and modular, any keyword arguments you pass into the Notify class will be set on the notification class as a protected member. For example if we have this:

Notify.mail(WelcomeNotification, to='[e-mail]')

It will set a _to attribute on the notification class BEFORE we get to the fire method.

So using the example above we will be able to do:

def fire_mail(self):
    self._to # [e-mail]

We can use this behavior to pass in information into the fire_mail method while keeping everything clean.

A practical example is sending the message to a certain user:

Notify.mail(WelcomeNotification, to='[e-mail]')

class WelcomeNotification(Notifiable):

    def mail(self):
        return self.line('{0} We greatly value your service!'.format(self._to)) \
            .action('Sign Back In', href="http://gbaleague.com")

Notice here we now have a _to member on our class we can use because we passed it through from our Notify class.

Sending The Mail

Ok so finally we have enough information we need to send the actual email. The fire_method is resolved by the container so we can simply specify what we need to send the email.

Our notification class will look like:

from your.package import MailComponent

class WelcomeNotification(Notifiable, MailComponent):

    def mail(self):
        return self.subject('New account signup!') \
            .line('We greatly value your service!')
      

Our Notify class will look like:

Notify.mail(WelcomeNotification, to='[e-mail]')

and our fire method will look like:

class MailComponent:

    template = ''
    
    def line(self, message):
        self.template += template
        return self
    
    def subject(self, subject)
        self._subject = subject
        return self
    
    def fire_mail(self, Mail):
        Mail.to(self._to) \
            .subject(self._subject) \
            .send(self.template)

Remember the _to class attribute that came from the keyword argument in the Notify class.