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Sending / Priority

Priority

How low, normal, high and urgent change how a notification is delivered and shown.

priority tells Push how much a notification matters. It is one of low, normal, high or urgent. When a send gives neither priority nor urgency, it is high, so notifications go out fast by default.

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request body

{  "recipient": "ops",  "title": "Database is down",  "body": "db-1 stopped answering health checks.",  "priority": "urgent"}

What it changes#

Effectlownormalhighurgent
Web Push Urgency headerlownormalhighhigh
DisplayShown without sound or vibration (silent)As sentAs sentStays on screen until the person acts (requireInteraction)
  • silent and requireInteraction are only filled in when you did not set them yourself. Sending "priority": "urgent", "requireInteraction": false keeps false.
  • Those two filled-in fields count toward the encoded size of the notification.
  • The Web Push Urgency header is a hint to the browser vendor's push service and the device's battery saving; low messages may wait until the device wakes.

The urgency field#

urgency is the older way to set this and still works as an alias. When both are sent, priority wins.

urgencyBecomes priority
very-lowlow
lowlow
normalnormal
highhigh
Noteurgency is deprecated. New code should send priority.

Choosing a priority#

  • urgent: something is broken now and a person has to act, like an outage page.
  • high: the default. Things people want to see soon, like a finished deploy or a new order.
  • normal: worth seeing, but not urgent, like a daily summary.
  • low: background updates that should not make a sound.

Hooks map their own priority formats onto these four. A notification's priority is shown in Get a notification.