sending-notifications

bởi posthog

Cách gửi thông báo trong ứng dụng theo thời gian thực từ mã backend của PostHog. Sử dụng khi tích hợp thông báo vào một tính năng mới, kết nối nguồn thông báo…

npx skills add https://github.com/posthog/posthog-foss --skill sending-notifications

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Sending real-time notifications

When to use this

You're adding notification support to a PostHog feature — for example, notifying a user when they're mentioned in a comment, when an alert fires, or when an approval is requested.

The facade API

All notification creation goes through a single function. Import from the facade, not from internal modules:

from products.notifications.backend.facade.api import (
    create_notification,
    NotificationData,
    NotificationType,
    Priority,
    TargetType,
)

Build a NotificationData and call create_notification:

event = create_notification(
    NotificationData(
        team_id=team.id,
        notification_type=NotificationType.ALERT_FIRING,
        priority=Priority.CRITICAL,
        title="Event ingestion latency > 30s",
        body="Events are queuing up. Ingestion pipeline is degraded.",
        target_type=TargetType.USER,
        target_id=str(user.id),
        resource_type="dashboard",
        resource_id="42",
        source_url="/dashboard/42",
    )
)

Returns a NotificationEvent on success, or None if the feature flag is disabled, no recipients were resolved, or the team doesn't exist. Safe to call in any context.

NotificationData fields

Required:

Field	Type	Description
`team_id`	`int`	Team context — used to look up the organization and check the feature flag
`notification_type`	`NotificationType`	Determines the icon in the UI
`title`	`str`	Notification headline (~100 chars recommended)
`body`	`str`	Longer description shown on expand. Can be empty string
`target_type`	`TargetType`	Who receives this: `user`, `team`, `organization`, or `role`
`target_id`	`str`	ID of the target (user ID, team ID, org UUID, or role UUID as string)

Optional:

Field	Type	Default	Description
`resource_type`	`NotificationResourceType \| None`	`None`	Access-controlled types (e.g. `"dashboard"`) auto-filter recipients without viewer access
`resource_id`	`str`	`""`	ID of the resource for linking
`source_url`	`str`	`""`	Relative URL path (e.g. `/dashboard/42`), shown as link icon in UI
`priority`	`Priority`	`NORMAL`	`normal` = popover only; `critical` = popover + persistent toast
`archivable`	`bool`	`False`	Opt in to a per-recipient "archive" (dismiss) action that moves the notification to the recipient's Archived tab. When `False`, recipients can only mark it read/unread (the default pattern)
`resolver`	`RecipientsResolver \| None`	`None`	Custom recipient resolver. Default handles user/team/org/role targeting

Choosing parameters

Notification type

Type	When to use
`comment_mention`	User was @mentioned in a comment or discussion
`alert_firing`	A monitoring alert threshold was breached
`approval_requested`	A change requires the user's approval
`approval_resolved`	An approval the user requested has been resolved
`pipeline_failure`	A data pipeline or batch export failed
`issue_assigned`	An error tracking issue was assigned to the user

Priority

Be very careful with critical. It triggers a persistent toast popup that overlays the user's screen and must be manually dismissed. This is intentionally intrusive — reserve it for genuine emergencies like outages, security alerts, or SLA breaches. Overusing critical will train users to ignore notifications entirely. When in doubt, use normal.

Target type

Target	`target_id` value	Recipients
`user`	User ID	Just that user
`team`	Team ID	All members of the team's organization
`organization`	Organization ID	All organization members
`role`	Role ID	All users with that RBAC role

Resource type and access control

When resource_type matches an access-controlled resource (dashboard, feature_flag, experiment, etc.), recipients without viewer access are automatically excluded. For notification-only types (pipeline, approval, comment), no AC filtering is applied.

Delivery pipeline

Django (create_notification)
  → Postgres (NotificationEvent row)
  → Kafka (notification_events topic, on transaction commit)
  → Go livestream service (Kafka consumer)
  → Redis SPUBLISH (sharded pub/sub, keyed by org ID)
  → SSE (/notifications endpoint)
  → Browser (popover + optional toast)

Kafka publish happens on transaction.on_commit — won't fire if the transaction rolls back.

Adding a new notification type

Add enum value in products/notifications/backend/facade/enums.py
Add icon mapping in frontend/src/lib/components/NotificationsMenu/notificationToasts.tsx (NOTIFICATION_TYPE_ICONS) — the single icon source, read by getNotificationIcon, which only NotificationRow calls; the side panel gets the icon by rendering that row
Add a label + description entry in frontend/src/lib/components/NotificationsMenu/NotificationRow.tsx (REALTIME_NOTIFICATION_TYPE_META) — drives the per-type notification preferences UI
Run python manage.py makemigrations notifications

Testing

Mock the feature flag in tests:

from unittest.mock import patch

with patch("posthoganalytics.feature_enabled", side_effect=lambda flag, *a, **kw: flag == "real-time-notifications"):
    event = create_notification(data)