Messages can be sent to channels from your backend (e.g. an API, a serverless function, etc) and be received by Channel subscribers (on your frontend app, for example).

​
Message Structure

When sending a message to a channel, you must specify 2 fields:
  • an event name, and
  • message data
The event name can be an arbritrary string of your choosing - for example, if we were making a group chat application and wanted to send a channel message when someone sends a chat message, we might call that event MESSAGE_CREATE. The data field can be any object. In the case of our group chat example, we might include the message content and author in the data object.
This reference assumes you have already set up the Hop server-side SDK.

​
Publish a Message to a Channel

sending-messages.js
// Import your Hop SDK instance
import { hop } from ".";

const channelId = "channel_xxx"; // the channel we want to send a message to

await hop.channels.publishMessage(
  channelId,
  // event name of your choosing
  "MESSAGE_CREATE",
  // event data, this can be any object you want it to be
  {
    content: "Hello Hop Channels!",
    author_name: "Vanilla",
  }
);