Listen for realtime location updates from pulsetracker on your backend

Introduction

Pulsetracker is a powerful, scalable, flexible location-tracking solution for developers seeking real-time updates without being bound to a proprietary client SDK. With Pulsetracker, you have the freedom to integrate location data into your own backend system using WebSockets or APIs, handling real-time tracking with battery-efficient technology.
This guide will walk you through setting up a Python client (listener) to connect to the Pulsetracker backend and listen for location updates.

Getting Started with PulseTracker

Pulsetracker's backend is capable of processing thousands of location changes per second and allows you to decide how to handle and store these updates.
This flexibility is a major advantage for developers who want to maintain control over their data and integration setup.

Here, we’ll connect to the Pulsetracker real-time update service (which is basically a pusher server) using a Python script that listens to a specific device’s location updates.

Setting Up the Python Client

Below is the code for a simple Python client that connects to the PulseTracker Pusher server, subscribes to a location update channel, and processes real-time location updates.

Prerequisites

To run the Python client, you’ll need:

• A Pulsetracker account with an API token.
• In Pulsestracker dashboard or API you can create new App and copy App key
• Python installed on your machine.
• The pysher library, a Python client for Pusher.

You can install pysher using pip:

pip install pysher

Python Code to Listen for Location Updates

Here is the Python client code, followed by a detailed explanation:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import sys
import pysher
import time

# Define global variable for Pusher client
global pusher

# Callback function to process location updates
def channel_callback(data):
    print("Channel Callback: %s" % data)
    # Todo: Pass the update to your queue server or to your database ... 

# Handler for connection establishment
def connect_handler(data):
    channel = pusher.subscribe("private-apps.YOUR_APP_KEY")
    channel.bind('App\\Events\\DeviceLocationUpdated', channel_callback)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    # Set your app key and auth endpoint here
    appkey = "YOUR_APP_KEY"
    auth_endpoint = "https://www.pulsestracker.com/api/broadcasting/auth"

    # Initialize Pusher client with custom host and authentication
    pusher = pysher.Pusher(
        key=appkey,
        auth_endpoint_headers={            
            "Authorization" : "Bearer YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN"
        },
        auth_endpoint=auth_endpoint,
        custom_host="pusher.pulsestracker.com",
        secure=True,
    )
    pusher.connection.ping_interval = 30
    pusher.connect()

    # Bind the connection handler
    pusher.connection.bind('pusher:connection_established', connect_handler)

    while True:
        time.sleep(1)

Explanation of the Code

1. Imports and Setup:

   • We import necessary modules and define a global pusher variable, which will be used to manage the connection.

2. Defining the channel_callback Function:

   • This function will handle incoming location updates. Here, it simply prints the received data, but you can modify it to forward the data to a database, messaging queue, or any storage solution of your choice.

3. Setting the connect_handler:

   • This function subscribes the client to a specific channel and binds the channel_callback function to the event that transmits location updates, App\\Events\\DeviceLocationUpdated. This event is triggered whenever a new location update is available.

4. Initializing the Pusher Client:

   • The main script initializes the Pusher client with your specific app key and authentication endpoint.
   • The auth_endpoint_headers includes a Bearer token, which should be replaced with your actual PulseTracker API token.
   • custom_host is set to pusher.pulsestracker.com, which is the host for PulseTracker’s Pusher service.
   • The connection is configured to be secure (secure=True), and a ping interval is set to keep the connection alive.

5. Starting the Connection:

   • pusher.connect() establishes the connection with the server, and pusher.connection.bind binds the connect_handler to execute once the connection is successful.

6. Loop to Keep the Client Running:

   • Finally, a simple infinite loop ensures that the script stays active, listening for location updates indefinitely.

Next Steps

With the client running, it will receive real-time location updates from PulseTracker. You can further modify this script to:

• Save updates to a database.
• Forward the data to another API.
• Analyze the incoming data in real time.

Results

Conclusion

Pulsetracker provides an effective solution for developers to manage and integrate real-time location tracking into their own systems. With this Python client, you can seamlessly receive and handle location updates, enabling you to build custom, high-performance location-based applications without being locked into a specific client SDK or backend solution.

Happy tracking with Pulsetracker!