Question

I am trying to implement Superfeedr subscriptions using PubSubHubbub and Ruby on Rails. The problem is, the subscriptions are never confirmed, even though my callback prints out the hub.challenge string, which it successfully receives.

  def push
    feed = Feed.find(params[:id])
    if feed.present?
      if params['hub.mode'].present? and params['hub.verify_token'] == feed.secret
        feed.update_attribute(:is_active, (params['hub.mode'] == 'subscribe'))
        render text: params['hub.challenge']
        return
      elsif params['hub.secret'] == feed.secret
        parse(feed, request.raw_post)
      end
    end
    render nothing: true
  end

It sets feed.is_active = true, but Superfeedr Analytics shows no sign of subscription.

I am using 1 dyno Heroku hosting and async verification method.

Answer 1

The first thing you should check is the HTTP status code and the response BODY of your subscription request. I expect the code to be 422 to indicate that subscription was failed, but the body will help us know exactly what is going on.

Also, do you see the verification request in the logs?

A common issue with heroku is that if you use hub.verify=sync, you will need 2 dynos, because you have to concurrent requests in this case…