Tracking the online/offline status of users and devices is called ‘presence.’ It’s a powerful tool for building chat rooms, multiplayer gaming, machine-to-machine communication, and sensor networks to name a few.
In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to implement presence user detection functionality into your application in 6 easy steps.
- Install PubNub API
- Input publish/subscribe keys
- Subscribe with presence events
- Unsubscribe
- Detect users in the channel
And huzzah! You’re off and running with a simple presence application!
In the video below, Stephen and Tomomi walks you through the process step-by-step. If you want to follow along, check out our Presence Quick Start Tutorial for the code from the video, and use your favorite text editor and the JavaScript console.
Building Real-time Device and User Detection with Presence from PubNub on Vimeo.
We have a number of other quick start tutorials around our core features including:
- Pub/Sub Messaging: Basic publish-subscribe messaging for web, mobile, and IoT apps
- Storage & Playback: Store real-time message streams for future retrieval and playback
- Access Manager: Control access permissions to streams of data by person, device, or channel