Mercure-Hub: Getting started with Mercure-hub

This documentation is part of the Getting started guide. View the full guide here: How to get started with Mercure-hub.

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On the client side (your front end), simple JavaScript code that leverages the HTML5 SSE API is all you need.

Note: In this example, the subscriber is not authenticated. To make this example work, you must allow anonymous subscribers on the Stackhero dashboard.

const endpoint = '<XXXXXX>.stackhero-network.com';

const url = new URL('https://' + endpoint + '/.well-known/mercure');

// Add topics to listen to
url.searchParams.append('topic', `https://${endpoint}/users/1234`);
url.searchParams.append('topic', `https://${endpoint}/books/1`);

const eventSource = new EventSource(url);

// The callback is invoked each time an update is published
eventSource.onmessage = e => console.log(e);

On the server side (your back end), when you want to dispatch an update, simply send a POST request to the Mercure-hub API. Below is an example using Node.js along with the JsonWebToken and Request libraries:

const jwt = require('jsonwebtoken');
const request = require('request');

const endpoint = '<XXXXXX>.stackhero-network.com';
const publisherJwtKey = '<your publisher JWT key>';

// Define the data to dispatch
const data = {
  // The topic where the data will be pushed
  topic: `https://${endpoint}/books/1`,

  // The data to be sent to the topic
  data: JSON.stringify({
    available: false,
    date: new Date()
  })
};

// Generate the bearer token
const bearer = jwt.sign(
  { mercure: { publish: [ data.topic ] } },
  publisherJwtKey,
  {
    expiresIn: 60, // Token expires in one minute
    noTimestamp: true // Do not include the 'issued at' timestamp to avoid "Token used before issued" errors
  }
);

// Send the data to Mercure-hub so that it dispatches the update to clients
request.post(
  {
    url: `https://${endpoint}/.well-known/mercure`,
    auth: { bearer },
    form: data
  },
  (err, res) => err ? console.error(err) : console.log(res)
);

That's it! You now have a subscriber on the front end and a publisher on the back end working together seamlessly.