I'm starting with the new Google service for the notifications, Firebase Cloud Messaging.
Thanks to this code https://github.com/firebase/quickstart-android/tree/master/messaging I was able to send notifications from my Firebase User Console to my Android device.
Is there any API or way to send a notification without use the Firebase console? I mean, for example, a PHP API or something like that, to create notifications from my own server directly.
Update: the API called here stopped working in the second half of 2024. For an example of how to send a message with a REST request in the v1 API, see Send messages to specific devices
From there:
curl -X POST -H "Authorization: Bearer ya29.ElqKBGN2Ri_Uz...HnS_uNreA" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{
"message":{
"notification":{
"title":"FCM Message",
"body":"This is an FCM Message"
},
"token":"bk3RNwTe3H0:CI2k_HHwgIpoDKCIZvvDMExUdFQ3P1..."
}}' https://fcm.googleapis.com/v1/projects/myproject-b5ae1/messages:send
You'll need to get an authorization token to be able to make this call. The process for that is documented in authorizing send requests.
Note: the below answer no longer works as the endpoint/API it uses has been decommissioned. It is merely left for historical completeness. Use the approach above to send FCM messages with CURL from now on.
Firebase Cloud Messaging has a server-side APIs that you can call to send messages. See https://firebase.google.com/docs/cloud-messaging/server.
Sending a message can be as simple as using curl to call a HTTP end-point. See https://firebase.google.com/docs/cloud-messaging/server#implementing-http-connection-server-protocol
curl -X POST --header "Authorization: key=<API_ACCESS_KEY>" \
--Header "Content-Type: application/json" \
https://fcm.googleapis.com/fcm/send \
-d "{\"to\":\"<YOUR_DEVICE_ID_TOKEN>\",\"notification\":{\"title\":\"Hello\",\"body\":\"Yellow\"}}"
You can all this REST API from within any environment, but there are dedicated so-called Admin SDKs for many platforms listed here.