Documentation

Understand the fundamentals and features of Ably's realtime platform.

Get started with Ably's APIs to build powerful, scalable apps.

Sometimes it's just easier to see code. Step through our tutorials and write some code.

Learn about recommended and reusable design patterns for building realtime apps at scale.

Create and maintain a persistent connection to Ably.

API of our synchronous REST library used primarily in server.

If you want to communicate with Ably using our raw REST API, here's everything you need to know.

Learn what you need to know about using Ably with MQTT.

Learn how to use SSE and HTTP Streaming with Ably.

Automate provisioning, management and testing of your Ably realtime infrastructure.

We've got you covered in every popular platform.

Publish streams of realtime data over channels instantly to a limitless number of subscribers.

Subscribe to events when devices or users enter, leave or update their state on channels.

Find out about the ways you can authenticate connections in a way which works for you.

Realtime data persisted into our database can be retrieved at a later time by devices or servers.

If you consider your data to be sensitive, then our libraries offer symmetric 256-bit AES encryption ensuring no-one, including ourselves, can inspect your data payloads.

With Ably, loss of connectivity does not need to result in data loss. We provide message continuity to your users when their devices become disconnected for up to two minutes.

Use our Push notifications to notify users even when they are not active on your app.

Use our account dashboards or REST APIs to get access to your account analytics in real time.

We can notify your servers over HTTP in real time when devices become present, channels become active, or messages are published.

Allow your serverless functions, such as Amazon Lambda, to be invoked following channel lifecycle events (such as channel creation), presence events (such as members entering or leaving) or messages being published.

Process, transform and respond to realtime data as it happens. Our message queues allow you to do this the right way from your own worker servers.

Stream your realtime data published within the Ably platform directly to another streaming or queueing service such as Amazon Kinesis or Apache Storm.