Configure your first channel to start sending notifications to your users.
A channel is a destination for the notifications you generate with Knock.
Channel types
There are two types of channels supported in Knock today: in-app and email.
We support a number of email channel providers out-of-the-box, including Postmark, SendGrid, Mailgun, and AWS SES .
Our in-app channel is consumed via the Knock API, so you won't need to configure any external providers as a part of this getting started guide.
If you use a channel or a provider that we don't support, shoot us a note at [email protected] and let us know.
Channels and environments
A channel lives on your Knock account but is configured per environment. This means that if you create a new channel for your SendGrid emails, you'll create that channel once for your account and then configure that channel's provider details (e.g. API key, from address) once on each of your environments. This enables you to use different instances of a provider (such as SendGrid) for your separate development and production environments. If you'd rather just use the same provider instance across all environments, you can copy your provider config across each environment.
<aside> <img src="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/6f0a6297-f766-4a31-b9b1-ce9fb409f355/jedi.gif" alt="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/6f0a6297-f766-4a31-b9b1-ce9fb409f355/jedi.gif" width="40px" /> The more you know. You can learn more about environments, including advanced features such as adding additional environments and configuring environment variables, at the ‣ support page.
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Here's how to create a channel in Knock.
Once your channel is created, you'll see the per environment configurations for that channel.
For in-app feeds, the only thing you have left to do is set the retention policy for your in-app feed (i.e. how long we should retain messages.) When you're ready to implement the feed in your product, you'll grab the API key for your in-app channel and use it in the frontend of your application.
