Sending push notifications to your mobile application can require a lot of development and maintenance. Fortunately in all the Azure products, one will help you to send push notifications cross-platform with minimum efforts: Azure Notification Hubs.
Today we will focus on creating an Azure Resource Manager template to easily setup and deploy a Notification Hub to a resource group. Our ARM template will be created in a new Azure Resource Group deployment project in Visual Studio.
Creation
Let's declare the parameters of the ARM template:
{
"$schema": "https://schema.management.azure.com/schemas/2015-01-01/deploymentTemplate.json#",
"contentVersion": "1.0.0.0",
"parameters": {
"notificationHubNamespaceName": {
"type": "string",
"defaultValue": "[concat('myNotifHubNs', uniqueString(resourceGroup().id))]"
},
"notificationHubName": {
"type": "string",
"defaultValue": "[concat('myNotifHub', uniqueString(resourceGroup().id))]"
},
"notificationHubSkuName": {
"type": "string",
"defaultValue": "free",
"allowedValues": [
"free",
"basic",
"standard"
]
}
}
...
}
Now we will declare the resources composed by the Notification Hub namespace and the Notification Hub:
{
...
"resources": [
{
"apiVersion": "2014-09-01",
"name": "[parameters('notificationHubNamespaceName')]",
"type": "Microsoft.NotificationHubs/namespaces",
"location": "[resourceGroup().location]",
"sku": {
"name": "[parameters('notificationHubSkuName')]"
},
"properties": {
"name": "[parameters('notificationHubNamespaceName')]",
"namespaceType": "NotificationHub"
},
"resources": [
{
"apiVersion": "2014-09-01",
"name": "[concat(parameters('notificationHubNamespaceName'),'/',parameters('notificationHubName'))]",
"type": "Microsoft.NotificationHubs/namespaces/notificationHubs",
"location": "[resourceGroup().location]",
"dependsOn": [
"[concat('Microsoft.NotificationHubs/namespaces/', parameters('notificationHubNamespaceName'))]"
],
"properties": {
"name": "[parameters('notificationHubName')]"
},
"tags": {
"displayName": "NotificationHub"
}
}
],
"tags": {
"displayName": "NotificationHubNamespace"
}
}
]
...
}We can pay attention to several things here:
And to finish, we will output the primary connection string of the hub:
{
...
"outputs": {
"NotificationHubNamespaceConnectionString": {
"type": "string",
"value": "[listKeys(resourceId('Microsoft.NotificationHubs/namespaces/notificationHubs/authorizationRules', parameters('notificationHubNamespaceName'), parameters('notificationHubName'), 'DefaultFullSharedAccessSignature'), providers('Microsoft.NotificationHubs', 'namespaces/notificationHubs').apiVersions[0]).primaryConnectionString]"
}
}
}As you can notice, we take advantage of the ARM template function listKeys and the ARM template function providers.
The function providers is useful to get the latest API version for a specific namespace, whereas listkeys is the function that will allow us to get the properties for a specific key name.
By default when a new hub is created, two access keys are created: DefaultListenSharedAccessSignature and DefaultFullSharedAccessSignature. In our template we retrieve the primary connection string for the second one.
Example of use
The ARM template is now ready, let's open a Windows PowerShell and try it:
.\Deploy-AzureResourceGroup.ps1 -ResourceGroupName 'MyResourceGroupName' -ResourceGroupLocation 'canadaeast' -TemplateFile '.\azuredeploy.json'
...
OutputsString :
Name Type Value
=============== ========================= ==========
notificationHubNamespaceConnectionString String Endpoint=sb://mynotifhubnsjibxupcseloca.servicebus.windows.net/;SharedAccessKeyName=DefaultFullSharedAccessSignature;SharedAccessKey=b0zOZuqc/mvrcLq8M49mfLomHBw4PH56uazMM/8r22Q=
If everything goes well, you should see the same kind of output as above.
To go further
In the template we are outputting the connection string as an example. But in a more advance scenario with a Website you could directly set the application setting that require the connection string like the following:
{
...
"resources": [
{
...
"resources": [
{
"apiVersion": "2015-08-01",
"name": "appsettings",
"type": "config",
"dependsOn": [
"[resourceId('Microsoft.NotificationHubs/namespaces/notificationHubs', parameters('notificationHubNamespaceName'), parameters('notificationHubName'))]",
"[resourceId('Microsoft.Web/sites', parameters('myWebsiteName'))]"
],
"properties": {
"NotificationHubConnectionString": "[listKeys(resourceId('Microsoft.NotificationHubs/namespaces/notificationHubs/authorizationRules', parameters('notificationHubNamespaceName'), parameters('notificationHubName'), 'DefaultFullSharedAccessSignature'), providers('Microsoft.NotificationHubs', 'namespaces/notificationHubs').apiVersions[0]).primaryConnectionString]",
"NotificationHubPath": "[parameters('notificationHubName')]"
}
}
]
...
}
]
...
}
Summary
We have seen how to create an ARM template that will deploy an Azure Notification Hub and output the primary connection string.
You can download the example solution here:
Or
Browse the GitHub repository
Please feel free to comment or contact me if you have any question about this article.