Sending Notifications

Mini Apps can send notifications to users who have added the Mini App to their Farcaster client and enabled notifications.

Overview

At a high-level notifications work like so:

• when a user enables notifications for your app, the Farcaster client (i.e. Warpcast) hosting your app will generate a notification token for that user and send it to your server
• to send a notification to a user, make a request to host's servers with the notification token and content
• if a user later disables notifications, you'll receive another event indicating the user is unsubscribed and the notification token is no longer valid

Steps

{
  "accountAssociation": {
    "header": "eyJmaWQiOjU0NDgsInR5cGUiOiJjdXN0b2R5Iiwia2V5IjoiMHg2MWQwMEFENzYwNjhGOEQ0NzQwYzM1OEM4QzAzYUFFYjUxMGI1OTBEIn0",
    "payload": "eyJkb21haW4iOiJleGFtcGxlLmNvbSJ9",
    "signature": "MHg3NmRkOWVlMjE4OGEyMjliNzExZjUzOTkxYTc1NmEzMGZjNTA3NmE5OTU5OWJmOWFmYjYyMzAyZWQxMWQ2MWFmNTExYzlhYWVjNjQ3OWMzODcyMTI5MzA2YmJhYjdhMTE0MmRhMjA4MmNjNTM5MTJiY2MyMDRhMWFjZTY2NjE5OTFj"
  },
  "frame": {
    "version": "1",
    "name": "Example App",
    "iconUrl": "https://example.com/icon.png",
    "homeUrl": "https://example.com",
    "imageUrl": "https://example.com/image.png",
    "buttonTitle": "Check this out",
    "splashImageUrl": "https://example.com/splash.png",
    "splashBackgroundColor": "#eeccff",
    "webhookUrl": "https://example.com/api/webhook"
  }
}

export type FrameLocationNotificationContext = {
  type: 'notification';
  notification: {
    notificationId: string;
    title: string;
    body: string;
  };
};

Receiving webhooks

Users can add and configure notification settings Mini Apps within their Farcaster client. When this happens Farcaster clients will send events your server that include data relevant to the event.

This allows your app to:

• keep track of what users have added or removed your app
• securely receive tokens that can be used to send notifications to your users

Events

frame_added

Sent when the user adds the Mini App to their Farcaster client (whether or not this was triggered by an addFrame() prompt).

The optional notificationDetails object provides the token and url if the client equates adding to enabling notifications (Warpcast does this).

Payload

{
  "event": "frame_added",
  "notificationDetails": {
    "url": "https://api.warpcast.com/v1/frame-notifications",
    "token": "a05059ef2415c67b08ecceb539201cbc6"
  }
}

frame_removed

Sent when a user removes a mini app, which means that any notification tokens for that fid and client app (based on signer requester) should be considered invalid:

Payload

{
  "event": "frame_removed"
}

notifications_disabled

Sent when a user disables notifications from e.g. a settings panel in the client app. Any notification tokens for that fid and client app (based on signer requester) should be considered invalid:

Payload

{
  "event": "notifications_disabled"
}

notifications_enabled

Sent when a user enables notifications (e.g. after disabling them). The payload includes a new token and url:

Payload

{
  "event": "notifications_enabled",
  "notificationDetails": {
    "url": "https://api.warpcast.com/v1/frame-notifications",
    "token": "a05059ef2415c67b08ecceb539201cbc6"
  }
}

Handling events

Farcaster clients will POST events to the webhookUrl specified in your farcaster.json.

Your endpoint should:

• verify the event
• persist relevant data
• return a 200 response

If your app doesn't respond with a 200, the Farcaster client will attempt to re-send the event. The exact number of retries is up to each client.

Verifying events

Events are signed by the app key of a user with a JSON Farcaster Signature. This allows Mini Apps to verify the Farcaster client that generated the notification and the Farcaster user they generated it for.

The @farcaster/frame-node library provides a helper for verifying events. To use it, you'll need to supply a validation function that can check the signatures against the latest Farcaster network state.

An implementation that uses Neynar is provided. You can sign up and get an API key on their free tier. Make sure to set NEYNAR_API_KEY environment variable.

Example

import {
  ParseWebhookEvent,
  parseWebhookEvent,
  verifyAppKeyWithNeynar,
} from "@farcaster/frame-node";
 
try {
  const data = await parseWebhookEvent(requestJson, verifyAppKeyWithNeynar);
} catch (e: unknown) {
  const error = e as ParseWebhookEvent.ErrorType;
 
  switch (error.name) {
    case "VerifyJsonFarcasterSignature.InvalidDataError":
    case "VerifyJsonFarcasterSignature.InvalidEventDataError":
      // The request data is invalid
    case "VerifyJsonFarcasterSignature.InvalidAppKeyError":
      // The app key is invalid
    case "VerifyJsonFarcasterSignature.VerifyAppKeyError":
      // Internal error verifying the app key (caller may want to try again)
  }
}

Reference implementation

For a complete example, check out the Mini App V2 Demo has all of the above:

• Handles webhooks leveraging the @farcaster/frame-node library that makes this very easy
• Saves notification tokens to Redis
• Sends notifications