Tools
This topic lists some developer resources and tools you can use to increase your productivity with Ably.
Ably for Visual Studio Code
Use the Ably for Visual Studio Code extension to manage your Ably apps directly in Visual Studio Code.
The extension enables you to:
- List all apps in your Ably account.
- View API keys, queues and integration rules for each app.
- Copy API keys to your clipboard.
- Create an Ably app.
Ably Terraform provider
Terraform provider for Ably enables you to manage your Ably account using Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), including managing your applications, namespaces, keys, queues, rules and more.
Ably Control API GitHub Action
A GitHub Action to use the Ably Control API. You can use this action to:
- Create an Ably application.
- Add an API key to an application, with a list of capabilities.
Developer console
The Ably dashboard contains a developer console. In the developer console you can view connection events. The following screenshot illustrates an example connection:

You can attach to a specific channel to view messages. You can also publish messages directly in the console:

The developer console provides you with some REST API Curl command snippets that can help you test out Ably quickly:

Note, for convenience, the Curl commands have your Ably credentials already added.
React hooks
Use Ably in your React application using idiomatic React Hooks.
Using this package you can:
- Interact with Ably channels using a React hook.
- Send messages via Ably using the channel instances the hooks provide.
- Get notifications of user presence on channels.
- Send presence updates.
The hooks provide a simplified syntax for interacting with Ably. The hooks also manage the lifecycle of the Ably SDK instances for you, subscribing and unsubscribing to channels and events when your React components re-render.