Introduction
Vixus Push is a realtime messaging service that speaks the Pusher protocol. You keep the Pusher client and server libraries you already know and point them at Vixus Push instead of Pusher.
How it fits together
- Clients (browsers, mobile apps) open a WebSocket to Vixus Push and subscribe to channels.
- Your backend publishes events to those channels through the HTTP API. Every Pusher server library does this for you, signing each request with your app secret.
- For private and presence channels, your backend also exposes an authorization endpoint that decides who may subscribe.
The app key is public: it ships to browsers. The app secret signs requests and authorizations, so it must only ever live on your servers.
Apps, plans and teams
Everything belongs to an organization. Inside it you create apps, each with an app_id, a key and a secret, and its own connections and limits. An organization's plan sets those limits, see Limits and quotas. Teammates join an organization with a role (owner, admin, developer, billing or viewer) that decides what they can see and change.
Compatibility
| Feature | Status |
|---|---|
| Public channels | Supported and tested |
| Presence channels | Supported and tested (the live demo in the dashboard uses one) |
| Private channels | Supported |
| Client events | Supported, switched on per app (Client events) |
| Server-side publish, batch publish, channel info | Supported (HTTP API) |
Encrypted private channels (private-encrypted-) | Supported by the underlying server, not covered by our tests |
Cache channels (cache-, private-cache-, presence-cache-) | Supported by the underlying server, not covered by our tests |
| User authentication | Supported by the underlying server, switched on per app |
| Webhooks | Not available in the dashboard yet |
Different from Pusher: there are no clusters (you set a host and port instead), no Pusher Beams push notifications, no event debug console or firehose, and no per-app list of allowed origins.
Where to go next
- Quickstart: a message from your server to a browser in five minutes.
- Channels and Authentication: the two ideas behind everything else.
- Migrate from Pusher: what to change in an existing app.