Documentation

Explore Ably's documentation, tutorials and API references that help you build realtime applications.

New to Ably?

For new users to Ably, we recommend you take a look at the following information before jumping into the documentation and client library SDKs.

Key concepts

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

Quickstart guide

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

Tutorials

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

Design patterns

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

Looking for implementation documentation?

If you understand the core realtime concepts and just want to dive in, then take a look at the following:

Realtime SDK

Create and maintain a persistent connection to Ably.

REST SDK

API of our synchronous REST library used primarily in server.

REST API

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

MQTT Adapter

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

Server-Sent Events (SSE) Adapter

Learn how to use SSE and HTTP Streaming with Ably.

Control API

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

Download an SDK

We've got you covered in every popular platform.

Understanding Ably features

Find information on the key features that Ably provides:

Pub/sub messaging

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

Presence

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

Authentication

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

Message history

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

End-to-end encryption

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.

Connection state recovery

Unique to Ably

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.

Push notifications

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

Realtime analytics

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

Ably Integrations

Start streaming realtime data to various other queues, services and streams with our Integration functionality.

Webhooks

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

Serverless functions

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.

Message queues

Unique to Ably

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.

Firehose

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