Backend Push Notifications

Overview

This service consumes messages from RabbitMQ, retrieves encrypted push tokens from a MySQL database, decrypts them, and sends notifications via the Expo Push API.

Features

• Automatic Retry Logic: Failed notifications are automatically retried up to 5 times with exponential backoff
• Dead Letter Queue (DLQ): Messages that exceed retry limits are moved to a DLQ for manual inspection
• Prometheus Metrics: Real-time monitoring of queue depths and message processing stats
• Token Management: Automatically expires invalid or unregistered device tokens

Architecture

RabbitMQ → Consumer → Database Lookup → Token Decryption → Expo Push API
                ↓                                              ↓
           Retry Queue ←─────────── Delivery Validation ──────┘
                ↓
           Dead Letter Queue

Prerequisites

• Python 3.10+
• MySQL/MariaDB database
• RabbitMQ server
• Expo Push Notification service account

Installation

pip install -r requirements.txt

Running the Service

python rabbitmq_handler.py

The service will:

1. Connect to the MySQL database
2. Establish RabbitMQ connection and declare queues
3. Start consuming messages
4. Begin Prometheus metrics server on port 9000

Configuration

Database Manager (db.py)

• Pool Size: 5 connections (configurable)
• Health Check Interval: 60 seconds
• Auto-commit: Enabled
• Cursor Type: DictCursor for convenient row access

RabbitMQ Consumer (rabbitmq_handler.py)

• Queue Name: notifications
• Retry Queue: notifications_retry
• Dead Letter Queue: notifications_dlq
• Max Retries: 5 attempts
• Retry TTL: 30 seconds
• Routing Key: notify.user.* (standard), notify.user.retry (retries)

Notification Sender (send_notification.py)

• Endpoint: https://exp.host/--/api/v2/push/send
• Max Retries: 5 attempts
• Timeout: 5 seconds per request
• Backoff Strategy: Exponential (2^attempt seconds)

Message Format

Messages should be published to RabbitMQ with the following structure:

{
	"title": "New Message",
	"body": "You have a new notification",
	"data": {
		"category": "utility",
		"link": "https://example.com",
		"timestamp": "1760734800"
}

Routing Key: notify.user.<user_id> or notify.user.retry for retries

Retry Messages

Retry messages include additional metadata:

{
  "title": "Notification Title",
  "body": "Notification message body",
  "uuid": "device-uuid-here",
  "retry_count": 2
}

Delivery Validation

The service validates delivery results from the Expo Push API:

Status	API Status	Action
ok	ok	Success - metric incremented
ok	error (DeviceNotRegistered)	Token expired in database
ok	error (other)	Sent to DLQ
error	-	Sent to DLQ
failure	-	Requeued for retry

Monitoring

Prometheus Metrics

Available at http://localhost:9000/metrics:

• msg_published_total: Successfully delivered notifications
• msg_retry_total{queue_name, uuid, retry_count}: Retry attempts
• msg_failed_total: Failed deliveries
• queue_depth{queue_name}: Current queue message counts

Troubleshooting

Connection Issues

• aiomysql uses PyMySQL which requires the mysql_native_password plugin to be used. Can be checked and changed via:

SELECT user, host, plugin FROM mysql.user WHERE user='backend-push-notifications';
ALTER USER 'backend-push-notifications'@'%' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY 'db_password';