To create your free managed, or docker-based Novu environment use our CLI tool:

npx novu init

After creating your cloud or self-hosted account, the next steps to sending your first notification are outlined in this guide:

  • Connect your providers
  • Create a workflow
  • Send a trigger
  • Integrate the Notification Center within your app (optional)

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Connect providers

On the Integration Store page, you can configure the different providers and their respective credentials. During the alpha phase only a single provider is allowed per channel, adding a second email provider will de-activate the previously added email provider.

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Create a workflow

After configuring the designated channel provider, you can create your workflow. You can think of the workflow as the blueprint for the notifications that will be sent. The workflow includes:

  • Workflow details
  • Channel specific content
  • Trigger definition

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Workflow Details

The name of the workflow is converted to a slug that is used as the trigger identifier which is used when sending the trigger from the back-end.

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Channel specific content

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Email

You can specify the content for emails in two ways:

Visual workflow builder - For simple use cases, you can use our visual workflow editor. The visual workflow builder has limited control over design but is easier to get-started with.

Custom Code - You can use the custom code section to specify custom html for the email.

You can specify custom variables using the handlebars syntax.

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SMS

Inside SMS, you can specify custom variables using handlebars syntax.

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In-app

In the notification center preview, you can type the content of the notification, select the content, and use CMD + B to make the selected text bold.

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Chat

You can specify custom variables using the handlebars syntax.

In addition to the integration, any subscriber needs to set credentials to have proper authorization on the channel.

The credentials can be saved through our @novu/node package.

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Trigger the workflow

After creating the workflow, Novu generates the trigger. Use the server SDK in your application in the appropriate place for the specific trigger.

await novu.trigger('<WORKFLOW_TRIGGER_IDENTIFIER>', {
  to: {
    subscriberId: '<USER_IDENTIFIER>',
    email: 'email@email.com',
    firstName: 'John',
    lastName: 'Doe',
  },
  payload: {
    customVariables: 'Hello',
  },
});

The trigger function contains a parameters object as the second parameter. Let’s explore its different options:

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to key

The to parameter contains the information about the subscriber of the notification. You can work with Novu in 2 modes:

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Pass the subscriber information in the trigger (Quickest)

You can pass the subscriber object containing the following keys as this parameter:

await novu.trigger('<WORKFLOW_TRIGGER_IDENTIFIER>', {
  to: {
    subscriberId: '<SUBSCRIBER_ID>',
    firstName,
    lastName,
    email,
    phone,
    avatar,
    locale,
  },
  payload: {},
});

The subscriberId is a custom identifier that identifies users within the Novu platform. We suggest using your internal DB identifier for this field.

When the trigger is called, Novu performs an upsert command, which either creates a subscriber with the specified payload, or updates the existing subscriber with the passed information.

Note: The API performs a PATCH command, updating only the fields passed to it. So to reset a specific field, you must explicitly pass null as the fields param.

{
  to: 'SUBSCRIBER_ID',
  payload: {}
}

In this approach, you only pass the subscriberId as part of the trigger, however, this approach requires you to identify the subscriber using the identify method from the @novu/nodelibrary.

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payload object

The payload object can pass any serializable JSON object to be used in the workflows.