19 ms·

Ntfy.sh – Send push notifications to your phone via PUT/POST

1346 points by tambourine_man 4y ago

bbviznbdb 4y ago
I use this with unified push for Element and Fedilab on LineageOS. It's pretty reliable about pushing new notifications out, but I wish Element used it better for dismissing notifications when I real a message on another client.
deleted 4y ago
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mihaigalos 4y ago
WHY are you pronouncing it "notify" in the README.md, instead of "nifty" ?! :) This app is something else. I love it!
bert2002 4y ago
Fantastic idea with the different topics
easton 4y ago
Super cool! I did something like this for personal use using a Discord bot (which you can also just POST to with no fancy backend if you want).
- Retr0id 4y ago
  Ditto. Discord works great for me because it's the one app I actually have installed on across most of my devices (including desktop), and regularly check notifications for.
- andai 4y ago
  I did the same with a Telegram bot to notify me about long-running jobs finishing on a server.
- RicoElectrico 4y ago
  Yeah, a one-person Discord "server" is a great way to have e.g. RSS notifications (via MonitoRSS) as well as simple bots. It is just remarkably straightworward - you don't need to register an app, just generate a webhook token and then curl a simple json to that endpoint. Now, I was confused and thought webhooks are somehow standardized, but they're not. It's kinda like RSS in reverse, with an application defined payload.
superasn 4y ago
Very nice. I use a telegram bot for doing this as telegram API also makes it a simple GET request to send such notifications to yourself (once you have created a bot). Also it's surprisingly hard to kill telegram for some reason so it's kinda robust. My stupid mi phone is quite aggresive in killing most background apps except whatsapp and telegram.
- gofreddygo 4y ago
  I use telegram for this too. Big reason is I can create groups and add people to such notifications. Super easy. I have some scheduled ci/cd pipelines that send notifications. Just scroll up for history. This setup has been working with no changes needed for couple years, no hiccups. Love it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- londons_explore 4y ago
  I find telegram messages only get insta-delivered about half the time. The other half, they're delayed till I next re-open the app. Doesn't seem to happen with any other app. I suspect it's because I'm subscribed to too many high traffic group chats, and even though they're muted, the telegram servers still send large numbers of push notifications for them, which eventually start hitting some rate limit and everything gets dropped - even for unmuted conversations.
  - OJFord 4y ago
    > I find telegram messages only get insta-delivered about half the time. The other half, they're delayed till I next re-open the app. Doesn't seem to happen with any other app. That happens to me with WhatsApp. Curiously a message to Telegram kicks it back into gear too. My fiancee first messages me 'calling' on Telegram before calling on WhatsApp, because she figured out (remotely, by experience) that otherwise it often doesn't ring.
- jorvi 4y ago
  > Also it's surprisingly hard to kill telegram for some reason so it's kinda robust. My stupid mi phone is quite aggresive in killing most background apps except whatsapp and telegram. Part of the reason for this is hardcoded whitelisting.
zx2c4 4y ago
I love this project. Super simple to interface with, accomplishes the task very well, reliable, good documentation. It's hard to think of better design and execution for this type of utility. I use it to get notifications of the CI running on build.wireguard.com, which took less than a minute to get working. Sometimes I'll use it for random one-off notifications, like when a command finishes running or some shell script sleep-loop scraper finds what it was waiting for. It's the nicest thing I've had for that kind of thing since mytelephonenumber@txt.att.net.
- binwiederhier 4y ago
  Thank you for saying that Jason; it means a lot coming from you. I remember when you sent me that email months ago it was super cool for me. The creator of WireGuard emailing meee? whoa! Anyway. Thanks again for the kind words.
gl-prod 4y ago
Nice! I'm using https://patchbay.pub https://patchbay.pub to create something like this.
thecodemonkey 4y ago
Neat! I built something similar a while ago, to scratch my own itch. It's just using text messages instead of a dedicated app (for good or for worse). It's funny how similar the domain name is. https://nudge.sh https://nudge.sh https://github.com/geocodio/nudge.sh https://github.com/geocodio/nudge.sh
zikduruqe 4y ago
Combine this with Apprise and you have yourself a nice push to anything service. https://github.com/caronc/apprise https://github.com/caronc/apprise
- binwiederhier 4y ago
  Apprise has official ntfy support, which is awesome
- otbutz 4y ago
  OT but i wish they'd add Mastodon support. https://github.com/caronc/apprise/issues/586 https://github.com/caronc/apprise/issues/586
  - l2g 4y ago
    Mastodon Support added
  - l2g 4y ago
    Let me see what I can do about prioritizing this one a bit.
    - otbutz 4y ago
      That would be great! I've only had a quick look at the docs, but the API seems reasonable: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/apps/oauth/ https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/apps/oauth/ https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/statuses/ https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/statuses/
      - l2g 4y ago
        It's not the sending the messages that has me stumped, it's the setup of the server (the hosting of it itself). Do you know of a public service that exists i could build/test the Apprise plugin against? Would love just even temporary access to a server to perfect its design (then my account could be terminated)
matxd 4y ago
I love it! Is it possible to subscribe without downloading the app? For example by visiting a special page with some confirm button?
- binwiederhier 4y ago
  There are various ways to subscribe with or without the app. Deep links to subscribe are supported: https://ntfy.sh/docs/subscribe/phone/#ntfy-links https://ntfy.sh/docs/subscribe/phone/#ntfy-links -- not sure if that's what you meant. If this doesn't work for you, you can always create a ticket or make your own app or website using the subscription API: https://ntfy.sh/docs/subscribe/api/ https://ntfy.sh/docs/subscribe/api/
- dspillett 4y ago
  I'm not in a position to try ATM, I thought the same question, but could you not just use the web app and have the mobile browser post notifications as happens on the desktop version? There might be different limitations wrt delivery latency between the app and sit though, particularly when your device is in low power mode to conserve battery between periods of activity.
Version467 4y ago
Oh this is awesome. Tried it out just yet and it worked right away. Software can be so great when it's not desperately trying to sell you something.
laughy 4y ago
I have a custom written function in R that loads in .Rprofile to push messages e.g. when some script is done.
polivier 4y ago
I love this project. I use these notifications in many of my scripts. You can send push notifications to your phone (iOS/Android) with a simple curl command. Easily one of my favorite open-source projects.
willjp 4y ago
Thank you! This is fantastic
idop 4y ago
Hey there. In Android, is there a requirement or any kind of dependency on Google Play Services? Also, do notifications work when the Ntfy app is in the background? Do I need to disable battery optimizations for it? Thanks!
- daedric7 4y ago
  No, you can download the app from F-droid. There's no dependency on Google services, although the app can use them if available.
- coldacid 4y ago
  Given that the ntfy Android app is available through F-Droid, I strongly doubt that Google Play Services is used at all.
  - danuker 4y ago
    I suspect the F-Droid version might have delays. There are various issues when avoiding Firebase. There is no way to fulfill all of these: - avoid Google servers - preserve battery - show timely notifications https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-android/issues/82 https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-android/issues/82
    - binwiederhier 4y ago
      This is incorrect (at least in my experience). Firebase/FCM is significantly slower in delivering messages than the non-Firebase version (WebSockets or JSON stream, longstanding connection). It was actually mindboggling to me how slow Firebase is in delivering messages (especially when the phone is in doze mode).
      - akvadrako 4y ago
        But what kind of battery impact do you get leaving a long-running connection open?
mcjiggerlog 4y ago
This is really great! I have plenty of uses for this. Here's a quick fish function for being able to call this from a shell like `alt my message` function alt curl -d "\"$argv\"" ntfy.sh/<my topic> end
- chasil 4y ago
  I would actually do it with an SMS like this. $ cat /bin/awkmail #!/bin/gawk -f BEGIN { smtp="/inet/tcp/0/smtp.yourISP.com/25"; ORS="\r\n"; r=ARGV[1]; s=ARGV[2]; sbj=ARGV[3]; # /bin/awkmail to from subj < in print "helo " ENVIRON["HOSTNAME"] |& smtp; smtp |& getline j; print j print "mail from:" s |& smtp; smtp |& getline j; print j if(match(r, ",")) { split(r, z, ",") for(y in z) { print "rcpt to:" z[y] |& smtp; smtp |& getline j; print j } } else { print "rcpt to:" r |& smtp; smtp |& getline j; print j } print "data" |& smtp; smtp |& getline j; print j print "From: " s |& smtp; ARGV[2] = "" # not a file print "To: " r |& smtp; ARGV[1] = "" # not a file if(length(sbj)) { print "Subject: " sbj |& smtp; ARGV[3] = "" } # not a file print "" |& smtp while(getline > 0) print |& smtp print "." |& smtp; smtp |& getline j; print j print "quit" |& smtp; smtp |& getline j; print j close(smtp) } # /inet/protocol/local-port/remote-host/remote-port $ echo ricki dont lose that number | awkmail 9998675309@vtext.com me@here.com test
  - rsync 4y ago
    One issue with carrier email-to-sms gateways is that they truncate messages at a relatively short number of characters. Twilio SMS API, on the other hand, does not have that limit and you can send long SMS messages with a single 'curl' command: /usr/local/bin/curl -s -X POST -d "Body=$msg" -d "From=$from" -d "To=$to" "https://api.twilio.com/2010-04-01/Accounts/$accountsid/Messages" -u "$accountsid:$authtoken" That's simplified - I actually pipeline through 'tidy5' and 'source-highlight' to make the output pleasing: /usr/local/bin/curl -s -X POST -d "Body=$msg" -d "From=$from" -d "To=$to" "https://api.twilio.com/2010-04-01/Accounts/$accountsid/Messages" -u "$accountsid:$authtoken" | tidy5 -xml -iq | source-highlight -s xml -f esc | awk 'xor(/TwilioResponse/,/Message/,/To/,/From/,/Body/,/Status/,/ErrorCode/,/ErrorMessage/)' | grep -v "/2010-04-01/Accounts/"
spuz 4y ago
When I was making my IoT washing machine sensor, I used Blynk.io to push notifications to my phone but of course that service became commercialised and is no longer free. I could not find any nice easy to use alternative except for Telegram which is what I use now. This service looks exactly like what I would need and I appreciate the promise to keep it open source.
- lloydatkinson 4y ago
  https://pushover.net/ https://pushover.net/ Has existed for several years. It works great for me.
  - razemio 4y ago
    Yep. Same for me. Reliable, not subscription based and very easy to integrate. Nothing fancy in a positive manner.
  - spuz 4y ago
    Thanks, I may have dismissed Pushover simply because it isn't free but a $5 one time purchase is actually not too bad.
    - KaiserPro 4y ago
      I've used it for a very long time. it does only one thing, and does it well.
    - INTPenis 4y ago
      It's practically free. I bought the app once many years ago and have never sent more than 1000 pushes a month.
  - bippingchip 4y ago
    +1 for pushover I’ve been using for quite a fee years. The app is not free but once you pay the one-time fee for the app, they have a generous free tier for personal use, and it has worked quite flawlessly for me so far.
binwiederhier 4y ago
Hey cool, this is my project. Happy to answer questions. Edit: I am also looking for a new opportunity. If you need a good Staff/Principal Engineer, check out my resume here: https://heckel.io/resume.pdf https://heckel.io/resume.pdf
- marcus_cemes 4y ago
  From the repository that I found, it seems that you wrote the backend in Go. How did it hold up? Any lessons learned?
  - binwiederhier 4y ago
    No real lessons learned. I like Go, and I like that it lets me do no-fuzz-straight-to-the-point development. The single Go binary and server is handling the traffic just fine, and the architecture is simple and easy to extend. I am suffering a little right now while I try to add E2E encryption, because I structured the handlePublish logic awkwardly. But other than that there have been no surprises. Sorry that's such a boring answer.
- CommitSyn 4y ago
  Neat project. Where does the funding come from?
  - binwiederhier 4y ago
    It's quite cheap to run. It's just one small EC2 instance, and it's usually idling around a load average of 0.1 (though right now it's at 1, hehe). It costs me about $24/month. The Apple developer license costs $100 per year, so it's ~$400/year. As of recently, that's entirely covered by donations. I am incredibly humbled by the sponsorships. I would have never thought ntfy would take off like that. I love open source and I promise it'll always be free and open (as long as I can reasonably fight of the abusers). If you'd like to help me out me, you can donate via GitHub Sponsors: https://github.com/sponsors/binwiederhier https://github.com/sponsors/binwiederhier
kbns 4y ago
cool. e2e encryption would be great..
- binwiederhier 4y ago
  End to end encryption is already fully designed and partially implemented. I just had a baby and have no time to do it recently: https://github.com/binwiederhier/ntfy/issues/69 https://github.com/binwiederhier/ntfy/issues/69
  - kbns 4y ago
    will check. congratulations.
  - shivam543 4y ago
    If I run ntfy behind NGINX reverse proxy which is on https, isn't that E2E encrypted due to https?
    - adamckay 4y ago
      No, because your Nginx server decrypts that TLS connection so can access the plaintext data. This is typically called encrypted-in-transit. E2EE means that it's always encrypted from the sending device to the receiving device and nothing in the middle (including the service operator) can read it.
    - donatzsky 4y ago
      E2E implies that the data itself gets encrypted by the sender and is only decrypted by the receiver. With https, the "pipe" is encrypted, but the data is not and the server will get the plain-text.
freewizard 4y ago
This will be even more useful next year as Apple is said to open the flood gate of iOS web push in 2023
netheril96 4y ago
So the developer just pays for the server and the Apple Developer Program out of his/her own pocket for the public good?
- ksidudwbw 4y ago
- binwiederhier 4y ago
  Correct. Though by now it is covered by donations. This is my hobby. Others buy expensive bikes or cars, I buy Apple Developer licenses. Hehe.
  - zackmorris 4y ago
    If money gets tight, you could always sell it for $44 billion
littlethrowaway 4y ago
Wow, this is absolutely fabulous. Thank you very much for making it. Extremely simple to use. Just really well done.
krono 4y ago
From the FAQ[1]: > Will you know what topics exist, can you spy on me? > If you don't trust me or your messages are sensitive, run your own server. This is the way. No pinky promises in whitepaper format[2] that leave out the most important bits, no meticulously constructed but entirely meaningless marketing statements[3][4], but unassuming and deferential logic with a mitigation path. 1: https://ntfy.sh/docs/faq/#will-you-know-what-topics-exist-can-you-spy-on-me https://ntfy.sh/docs/faq/#will-you-know-what-topics-exist-ca... 2: (warning: redirects with identifiers, how ironic) https://www.whatsapp.com/security/WhatsApp-Security-Whitepaper.pdf https://www.whatsapp.com/security/WhatsApp-Security-Whitepap... 3: https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/privacy-report https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/privacy-report 4: https://www.apple.com/privacy/ https://www.apple.com/privacy/
- krn 4y ago
  Why couldn't the entire system be E2E encrypted by default, though? In 2022, that's my standard expectation from any service. Even such things as Pocket / Instapaper / Raindrop should come with E2E encryption by default. It's better for the service provider, too: no issues with GDPR, or in case of a database hack.
  - ilogik 4y ago
    If you don't trust the person that wrote the software, it doesn't matter if it's E2E encrypted or not. There could be a back-door
    - ilyt 4y ago
      which software ? You might have 3rd party client implementation that talks with another client and only server would be "unknown" party. E2E allows both clients to talk to eachother without server having a way to snoop on
    - krn 4y ago
      E2E encryption happens on the client side, not on the server side. Therefore, no need to trust anybody, as long as the software is open-source.
amelius 4y ago
From the build instructions: > You should download Android Studio (or IntelliJ IDEA with the relevant Android plugins). Everything else will just be a pain for you. Do yourself a favor. I'm not into mobile programming, and I wonder what is behind this statement.
- atentaten 4y ago
  Native mobile apps are typically built using Android Studio and its tooling. On the iOS side, it's Xcode and it's tooling
h43z 4y ago
I sometimes use my little service https://pushurl.43z.one/ https://pushurl.43z.one/ If I need to notify my desktop browser or phone with a notification triggered by some code. I just go to the website with my browser click generate. Then in my script I do `curl $pushurl?title=jobdone`. When it gets triggered a notification popups on my phone that says "jobdone". It uses the native browser web push API so I don't need to install anything extra.
- dlivingston 4y ago
  Awesome! Using it now. So seamless. Are there any other parameters besides `title`? _edit:_ wrote a little Bash function for this; seems to work well: function notify() { argTitle='TerminalNotification' argText="$1" argUrl='https://www.example.com' baseUrl='https://pushurl.43z.one/XXXXXXXXXXXXX' curl --get \ --data-urlencode "title=$argTitle" \ --data-urlencode "text=$argText" \ --data-urlencode "url=$argUrl" \ $baseUrl }
  - h43z 4y ago
    just `title`, `text` and `url` (which will open the specified `url` on notification click)
- hu3 4y ago
  Neat. I guess you had to visit pushurl.43z.one once with each browser you want to be notified right? I'm just curious.
  - h43z 4y ago
    Yes, exactly. The pushurl has to be generated with the browser on the device which you want send notifications to. The pushurl is bound to that browser.
- getcrunk 4y ago
  Is the code public? Seems simple to implement. But I'd rather copy and paste.
bilinguliar 4y ago
Just what I need. Left 5 star review.
TkTech 4y ago
Keep in mind that ntfy works with a bunch of backends. You can send the notifications to Telegram, jabber/XMPP, IRC (using my own https://n.tkte.ch https://n.tkte.ch), Slack, etc, etc. So, you probably don't have to actually install anything new to receive notifications and can just use what you've already got.
- jayrhynas 4y ago
  I don't think ntfy.sh does that, but are you talking about https://github.com/dschep/ntfy https://github.com/dschep/ntfy?
  - TkTech 4y ago
    You are 100% correct. Boy that's confusing. I thought they'd just gotten a new site!
    - jayrhynas 4y ago
      It looks like you could add ntfy.sh as a backend for dschep/ntfy, but just imagine trying to document that!
      - binwiederhier 4y ago
        When I found out about the name collision, i did: https://github.com/dschep/ntfy/pull/234 https://github.com/dschep/ntfy/pull/234 It apparently never got merged. ;-)
MediumOwl 4y ago
Great C2 channel, thanks!
spsesk117 4y ago
Disclaimer: I know the developer of Ntfy and have worked with them in the past. I love this tool because it sits in a very convenient place in the alerting and monitoring stack. At work the kind of alerting pipelines and frameworks needed can by necessity end up being nontrivial and somewhat sophisticated. If you run some stuff at home or in the cloud or whatever, I have often wanted some kind of simple alerting but never want to deal with mocking out similar systems that I've built at work. Ntfy sits perfectly in this space, and I've used to to frame out my own kind of micro-alerting frameworks for a bunch of stuff that I run. It's incredibly easy to encapsulate in something like a bash TRAP or even || conditionals on random cronjobs, and just makes getting some kind of alerting so trivial. As such, it's spiraled out into a lot of different stuff that I run.
- binwiederhier 4y ago
  Uhhhh. Who are you? Now I wanna know.
fareesh 4y ago
I made a simple virtual assistant app that does most of this stuff for me (i.e. notifications, two-way communications), with an API that can tie into other small projects - I've always assumed most developers have something like this of their own, i.e. some sort of Jarvis
bityard 4y ago
How does this compare to gotify?
rbut 4y ago
Another good open-source self-hosted alternative is Gotify. https://gotify.net https://gotify.net
- pmontra 4y ago
  I was adding a new application (i.e. a topic) to on my own instance today. Gotify is Go binary to run with very little configuration. It has an Android app to get somewhat realtime notifications on the phone. Probably an iOS one too. It also has a pretty extensive REST API to manage the instance and a management web app. https://gotify.net/ https://gotify.net/
atentaten 4y ago
Could this potentially replace Firebase Cloud Messaging for push notifications?
- kirimita 4y ago
  It is an UnifiedPush distributor, so it can replace FCM for applications supporting it. Here are most of the applications supporting UnifiedPush right now: https://unifiedpush.org/users/apps/ https://unifiedpush.org/users/apps/
  - binwiederhier 4y ago
    This is the way. UnifiedPush is sllooowly becoming more popular. Element (Matrix chat app) just added official support for it, which is super cool. And you can use ntfy as a distributor.
palata 4y ago
On Android, I have been using it for a while with Unified push: for Tusky (Mastodon client) and Element (Matrix client). Works well, I wish more services were using UnifiedPush (so that I would not need the constant Telegram notification, for instance).
popol12 4y ago
Thanks, I was using twilio free tier to send me some automated SMS, but this is even easier and more efficient !
pfoof 4y ago
Thank you. Finally I don't have to set up some crazy email auth or build a special app to get info from my pipelines or raspberry
- binwiederhier 4y ago
  You're welcome. Comments like this make me so happy. BTW if you _do_ want to send emails, ntfy can do that too, even without auth (limited to 16 a day though): https://ntfy.sh/docs/publish/#e-mail-notifications https://ntfy.sh/docs/publish/#e-mail-notifications
Havoc 4y ago
That's looking great. I like that the app is listed as not collecting info & self-hosting is an option. Gonna stick this on my home server & add some fw rules to filter out various countries
moss2 4y ago
Suuuuper cool thanks for sharing this. Gonna see if I can use this to push notify when my DNS fails to reach my hobby server cause my ISP has changed my IP.
ed25519FUUU 4y ago
Cool project. Another one I’ve used for this purpose is pushover. It’s a $5 lifetime fee. It’s worked well for me so far. https://pushover.net/ https://pushover.net/
- riedel 4y ago
  A really easy way to do this is a telegram bot ( if you don't care about E2E and a bit shady business model)
- Tepix 4y ago
  Can confirm, pushover has been good so far.
st3fan 4y ago
Hey I wrote a similar thing but then to send them to your Watch: https://astronote.app/hello https://astronote.app/hello I recently made it free because I am unable to monetize it. Please give it a try.
uean 4y ago
This is going to change everything for me. Thank you for this software! Exactly what we need for our in house monitoring and alerting.
PUSH_AX 4y ago
I've been using a personal slack instance essentially to do this (leveraging it as a notification centre is actually kind of trivial). I absolutely be looking at this however.
BigBalli 4y ago
I use Twilio SMS API for the same purpose. Great concept but I can't stand cluttering my phone (used to have PushBullet before). I also find SMS more reliable since iOS can throttle push delivery depending on your interactions.
SuperSandro2000 4y ago
This needs account syncing from the backend. You need to describe to every topic in every browser/app/device you use and message deletions are not synced.
- binwiederhier 4y ago
  Indeed it does. That is the most requested feature after E2E encryption and publishing messages from the app itself. See https://github.com/binwiederhier/ntfy/issues/159 https://github.com/binwiederhier/ntfy/issues/159 and +1 it if you want it too.
MauroIksem 4y ago
This is awesome. Lots of carriers have broke the ability to text phones. It just gets blocked so this is a great work around.
teekert 4y ago
This is great, will add it to my docker-compose.yaml and my scripts! To be clear, if 100 people subscribe to ntfy.sh/mytopic, they all receive this message, right? curl -d "Backup successful :)" ntfy.sh/mytopic I wonder how many people got one when I was testing...
- spurgu 4y ago
  Correct.
  - teekert 4y ago
    So, any nice topics? ;)
    - binwiederhier 4y ago
      There are two useful public topics: https://ntfy.sh/docs/publish/#public-topics https://ntfy.sh/docs/publish/#public-topics - https://ntfy.sh/announcements https://ntfy.sh/announcements for announcements (usually only release announcements) - https://ntfy.sh/stats https://ntfy.sh/stats for daily stats (right before midnight UTC) Note that messages are only cached for 12h server-side, so you'll not see any messages in there mostly. I suggest to just subscribe and see if you like getting these messages.
      - kemyke 4y ago
        Am I understand right that with the knowledge of the topic name I can also publish announcement messages into that "official" topic?
        binwiederhier 4y ago
        No. There are ACLs to protect them, see https://ntfy.sh/docs/config/#access-control https://ntfy.sh/docs/config/#access-control But for all other topics, yes. Knowing the topic means you can publish to it.
nurettin 4y ago
Honorable mention: I've been a happy pushover customer (not affiliated) All I did was pay $5 several years ago and I still have 10k messages/mo which is good enough for all my automation so far.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
fkld 4y ago
Darn, I came up with this recently and thought the only competitor was pushed.io, I do have a secret ingredient. Time will tell once I’m done
- joeevans1000 4y ago
  Keep at it... it's important to have multiple options, and I know the OP would likely encourage you to keep at it. Of course, make it open source as they did, if you can. :-)
geocrasher 4y ago
Been using ntfy.sh for a while now, ever since I saw it on HN a couple of years ago or so. It's great for automated server notifications and the like. I even tied it to a web form as an ersatz on-call system.
tasn 4y ago
This is great! I used to just use XMPP for this (so send an XMPP message to myself), but I guess having a push notification can mean you can do more powerful things with it.
- Zash 4y ago
  But, XMPP is push all by itself already, and works with mobile push notification services where needed.
  - tasn 4y ago
    Yeah, that's why I used it. It was simple and awesome! What I meant is that by supporting push notifications directly, you can do things like supporting action buttons, open a link when clicking the notification, etc, rather than just XMPP which was what my solution did.
gkfasdfasdf 4y ago
Very cool! I think notifications could work on android without an app via browser notifications from the website, if they don't already.
Ptchd 4y ago
not sure why "phone" is in the title of this post, but it appears to work well.... I would rather use a E2EE messenger for things like this though (chatting with myself)
TheAceOfHearts 4y ago
Another alternative: you can send notifications to your phone through text messages. Text messages are compatible with email, usually in the form of <number>@<special-provider-url>.
- vagrantJin 4y ago
  Interesting. Please elaborate.
  - onedr0p 4y ago
    Very neat. I just searched and if you have Verizon it's possible via <phonenumber>@vtexts.com don't put dashes in your phone number. You can read more about it below. https://www.verizon.com/about/news/vzw/2013/06/computer-to-phone-text-messaging https://www.verizon.com/about/news/vzw/2013/06/computer-to-p...
  - duderific 4y ago
    Not OP but, for a while you could email a message to 5559991212@verizon.net and it would send a text to the phone number 555-999-1212. Not sure if it still works that way though.
areichert 4y ago
Oh dang, just last week I started working on my own version of this [0]. Quite fun to hack on! Been thinking about what could be done to really differentiate. Anyways, it's amazing that this is free! Very clean, very well done... bravo :) [0] https://www.booper.dev/ https://www.booper.dev/
- whatwherewhy 4y ago
  Don't be discouraged, you have a nice start of a JS API
brap 4y ago
I'm not a hater, I am genuinely curious, how does something like this get to 800 votes on HN and 4.4K stars on GitHub? I mean, it's just... a pub/sub server... using HTTP? With a thin UI for web/mobile? I'm obviously missing something, so what is it? Again, not a hater, even though it may come off like I am, I'm just honestly wondering what makes this special. From first glance it seems like something most devs can hack in an hour or two.
- vardump 4y ago
  Useful things get votes. Even if they're simple.
- wh33zle 4y ago
  There is hacking the functionality together in an hour or two and then there is polishing it to the point where it doesn't have rough edges and can easily be used by anyone with terminal experience. Personally, the chosen feature set resonates a lot with me. I like services that don't need accounts f.e. because they are so easy to use.
- norenh 4y ago
  It is small, simple and does the job. Also seems to have good documentation. What is there not to love about that? Do you know something better that fills the same gap?
- sunderous 4y ago
  I think the allure comes from solving a very sharp pain point if you're a hobbyist developer or new to mobile dev: push notifications. I don't know about others, but the first time I looked into apps, I could make sense of everything until I got to push notifications. Then it became this insanely complicated rabbit hole with a bunch of companies saying they'd solve it for you for 20 bucks a month or whatever. For something that on the surface sounds like it should be dead simple. So a simple, clean, free way to send a push notification to your phone, that you can use with a web request from anywhere? I can definitely see the mass appeal of that to the millions of people with small projects who don't want to become experts on google/apple's ecosystems just to make some words pop up on their phone.
hannofcart 4y ago
I use Opsgenie for most of the same use cases as this application. They have a free tier too. I keep my alert volumes very low.
- mlrhazi 4y ago
  Could you share a link to an explanation of how you use Opsgenie this way? Thanks!
__fst__ 4y ago
I use this service all the time to notify me when some long running scripts are finished. Also goes very well together with '''tail -f --pid XXXX /dev/null && curl -d "process is done" https://ntfy.sh/XXXXXXX https://ntfy.sh/XXXXXXX'''
_def 4y ago
On a side note, I'm noticing a lot of apps I install via Fdroid don't work on my phone, they crash immediately, while the play store version works (same for this app). I suspect this is a side effect of me using Lineage OS - does anyone have a clue what might fail there on my phone?
mavci 4y ago
I just tried and very liked it. Thank you so much. I am planning to integrate this service to my Hacker News notification app[1] [1] https://hnn.avci.me https://hnn.avci.me
jaktet 4y ago
Where in the docs does it mention the topic name validation? Is there a character limit? Restricted characters? This looks pretty neat.
- Loranubi 4y ago
  I was looking for this also.
mig39 4y ago
Why only on Macs with M1 chip? Doesn't work on intel?
dtgriscom 4y ago
I use textbelt.com to send text from my various test processes. It isn't free; it isn't even the cheapest. But, I can send 700 texts for $10, or about 1.5 cents per text. That is less than a second of my salary. Not worth my time to cut the cost further.
tveyben 4y ago
Awsome - Thank you for creating and open sourcing this cool tool!!!
Gazoche 4y ago
Ha! I made something similar with a Telegram bot :) https://github.com/Askannz/nag#http-endpoint https://github.com/Askannz/nag#http-endpoint
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khiqxj 4y ago
I did this 10 years ago by installing Tor on the phone and using a hidden service. It didn't need to be hidden, but it's much more convenient to set up than this while offering superior security with no effort. Actually I2P or something like that is a better way of doing it, just I only had Tor on the phone at the time and I2P is kind of script kiddie tier.
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torstenvl 4y ago
This is great, I just used this to replace a janky IFTTT notifier for when new ALNAV messages come out.
lobota 4y ago
Isn't this twilio 10 years ago?
herpderperator 4y ago
How do the JSON[0] and raw text[1] streams work? Doesn't that require there to be a thread running on the server for every connected client? How does that not become a slowloris attack? [2] [0] https://ntfy.sh/docs/subscribe/api/#subscribe-as-json-stream https://ntfy.sh/docs/subscribe/api/#subscribe-as-json-stream [1] https://ntfy.sh/docs/subscribe/api/#subscribe-as-raw-stream https://ntfy.sh/docs/subscribe/api/#subscribe-as-raw-stream [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slowloris_(computer_security) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slowloris_(computer_security)
- binwiederhier 4y ago
  Yes, subscribing requires connected clients to keep a connection open. I've tested this with many many thousand sockets and it seems to scale so far. Additionally I limit the number of subscriptions per IP address. So far so good.
thej 4y ago
I have hosted it on fly for $0, for friends and family. It's working very well. https://thejeshgn.com/2022/08/23/self-hosted-mobile-push-notifications-using-ntfy/ https://thejeshgn.com/2022/08/23/self-hosted-mobile-push-not...
techn0rabbit 4y ago
I love your project @binwiederhier. Lately I have migrated my daily driver from LineageOS to e-os (https://e.foundation/e-os/ https://e.foundation/e-os/). Both use microG, but for some Reason I have massive Lag receiving the Push Notifcations on e-os. Seems like it's not really receiving Notifications via Push, but rather via Pull. I'm running my own Instance, however I can rule out that it's a problem on the Server side, as it used to work without any Problems with LineageOS. Do you maybe have any ideas how I could debug that Problem? I've checked the microG app and allowed Push Notifications for ntfy. I've also made sure that Android's Battery Optimization Feature doesn't interfere with ntfy and I got the permanent Notification open (which keeps the ntfy Process running). Of course I've also built my own Android App and I use my own Google Firebase Credentials. I'm kinda lost at the moment, honestly. Would be great if you'd have some ideas how I could figure out what's wrong.
alex-korr 4y ago
I really like this product. Reading the documentation, it's not clear how to set the auth credentials per topic. Any way to clarify this?
- binwiederhier 4y ago
  There's a detailed description here: https://ntfy.sh/docs/config/#access-control https://ntfy.sh/docs/config/#access-control Though this doesn't work for the public server obviously. The public server doesn't support setting ACLs by users.
no-reply 4y ago
There was some other project for website monitoring / change detection that had nfty integration available. Anybody know ?
- binwiederhier 4y ago
  Maybe https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io? It has Apprise support, so you can use ntfy through that AFAIK.
mxuribe 4y ago
@binwiederhier I have heard wonderful things about ntfy.sh; kudos! Quick question: if my team and I already "subscribe" to a private matrix room to receive alerts from our automated scripts (which auto-send alerts into said private matrix room)...is there a need for also leveraging ntfy.sh into this type of workflow? Again, much love and respect to this project...I'm just trying to learn. Thanks!

1346 points by tambourine_man 4y ago

I use this with unified push for Element and Fedilab on LineageOS. It's pretty reliable about pushing new notifications out, but I wish Element used it better for dismissing notifications when I real a message on another client.

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mihaigalos 4y ago

WHY are you pronouncing it "notify" in the README.md, instead of "nifty" ?! :) This app is something else. I love it!

bert2002 4y ago

Fantastic idea with the different topics

easton 4y ago

Super cool! I did something like this for personal use using a Discord bot (which you can also just POST to with no fancy backend if you want).

Retr0id 4y ago
Ditto. Discord works great for me because it's the one app I actually have installed on across most of my devices (including desktop), and regularly check notifications for.
andai 4y ago
I did the same with a Telegram bot to notify me about long-running jobs finishing on a server.
RicoElectrico 4y ago
Yeah, a one-person Discord "server" is a great way to have e.g. RSS notifications (via MonitoRSS) as well as simple bots. It is just remarkably straightworward - you don't need to register an app, just generate a webhook token and then curl a simple json to that endpoint. Now, I was confused and thought webhooks are somehow standardized, but they're not. It's kinda like RSS in reverse, with an application defined payload.

superasn 4y ago

Very nice. I use a telegram bot for doing this as telegram API also makes it a simple GET request to send such notifications to yourself (once you have created a bot). Also it's surprisingly hard to kill telegram for some reason so it's kinda robust. My stupid mi phone is quite aggresive in killing most background apps except whatsapp and telegram.

gofreddygo 4y ago
I use telegram for this too. Big reason is I can create groups and add people to such notifications. Super easy. I have some scheduled ci/cd pipelines that send notifications. Just scroll up for history. This setup has been working with no changes needed for couple years, no hiccups. Love it.
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londons_explore 4y ago
I find telegram messages only get insta-delivered about half the time. The other half, they're delayed till I next re-open the app. Doesn't seem to happen with any other app. I suspect it's because I'm subscribed to too many high traffic group chats, and even though they're muted, the telegram servers still send large numbers of push notifications for them, which eventually start hitting some rate limit and everything gets dropped - even for unmuted conversations.
- OJFord 4y ago
  > I find telegram messages only get insta-delivered about half the time. The other half, they're delayed till I next re-open the app. Doesn't seem to happen with any other app. That happens to me with WhatsApp. Curiously a message to Telegram kicks it back into gear too. My fiancee first messages me 'calling' on Telegram before calling on WhatsApp, because she figured out (remotely, by experience) that otherwise it often doesn't ring.
jorvi 4y ago
> Also it's surprisingly hard to kill telegram for some reason so it's kinda robust. My stupid mi phone is quite aggresive in killing most background apps except whatsapp and telegram. Part of the reason for this is hardcoded whitelisting.

zx2c4 4y ago

I love this project. Super simple to interface with, accomplishes the task very well, reliable, good documentation. It's hard to think of better design and execution for this type of utility. I use it to get notifications of the CI running on build.wireguard.com, which took less than a minute to get working. Sometimes I'll use it for random one-off notifications, like when a command finishes running or some shell script sleep-loop scraper finds what it was waiting for. It's the nicest thing I've had for that kind of thing since mytelephonenumber@txt.att.net.

binwiederhier 4y ago
Thank you for saying that Jason; it means a lot coming from you. I remember when you sent me that email months ago it was super cool for me. The creator of WireGuard emailing meee? whoa! Anyway. Thanks again for the kind words.

gl-prod 4y ago

Nice! I'm using https://patchbay.pub https://patchbay.pub to create something like this.

thecodemonkey 4y ago

Neat! I built something similar a while ago, to scratch my own itch. It's just using text messages instead of a dedicated app (for good or for worse). It's funny how similar the domain name is. https://nudge.sh https://nudge.sh https://github.com/geocodio/nudge.sh https://github.com/geocodio/nudge.sh

zikduruqe 4y ago

Combine this with Apprise and you have yourself a nice push to anything service. https://github.com/caronc/apprise https://github.com/caronc/apprise

binwiederhier 4y ago
Apprise has official ntfy support, which is awesome
otbutz 4y ago
OT but i wish they'd add Mastodon support. https://github.com/caronc/apprise/issues/586 https://github.com/caronc/apprise/issues/586
- l2g 4y ago
  Mastodon Support added
- l2g 4y ago
  Let me see what I can do about prioritizing this one a bit.
  - otbutz 4y ago
    That would be great! I've only had a quick look at the docs, but the API seems reasonable: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/apps/oauth/ https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/apps/oauth/ https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/statuses/ https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/statuses/
    - l2g 4y ago
      It's not the sending the messages that has me stumped, it's the setup of the server (the hosting of it itself). Do you know of a public service that exists i could build/test the Apprise plugin against? Would love just even temporary access to a server to perfect its design (then my account could be terminated)

matxd 4y ago

I love it! Is it possible to subscribe without downloading the app? For example by visiting a special page with some confirm button?

binwiederhier 4y ago
There are various ways to subscribe with or without the app. Deep links to subscribe are supported: https://ntfy.sh/docs/subscribe/phone/#ntfy-links https://ntfy.sh/docs/subscribe/phone/#ntfy-links -- not sure if that's what you meant. If this doesn't work for you, you can always create a ticket or make your own app or website using the subscription API: https://ntfy.sh/docs/subscribe/api/ https://ntfy.sh/docs/subscribe/api/
dspillett 4y ago
I'm not in a position to try ATM, I thought the same question, but could you not just use the web app and have the mobile browser post notifications as happens on the desktop version? There might be different limitations wrt delivery latency between the app and sit though, particularly when your device is in low power mode to conserve battery between periods of activity.

Version467 4y ago

Oh this is awesome. Tried it out just yet and it worked right away. Software can be so great when it's not desperately trying to sell you something.

laughy 4y ago

I have a custom written function in R that loads in .Rprofile to push messages e.g. when some script is done.

polivier 4y ago

I love this project. I use these notifications in many of my scripts. You can send push notifications to your phone (iOS/Android) with a simple curl command. Easily one of my favorite open-source projects.

willjp 4y ago

Thank you! This is fantastic

idop 4y ago

Hey there. In Android, is there a requirement or any kind of dependency on Google Play Services? Also, do notifications work when the Ntfy app is in the background? Do I need to disable battery optimizations for it? Thanks!

daedric7 4y ago
No, you can download the app from F-droid. There's no dependency on Google services, although the app can use them if available.
coldacid 4y ago
Given that the ntfy Android app is available through F-Droid, I strongly doubt that Google Play Services is used at all.
- danuker 4y ago
  I suspect the F-Droid version might have delays. There are various issues when avoiding Firebase. There is no way to fulfill all of these: - avoid Google servers - preserve battery - show timely notifications https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-android/issues/82 https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-android/issues/82
  - binwiederhier 4y ago
    This is incorrect (at least in my experience). Firebase/FCM is significantly slower in delivering messages than the non-Firebase version (WebSockets or JSON stream, longstanding connection). It was actually mindboggling to me how slow Firebase is in delivering messages (especially when the phone is in doze mode).
    - akvadrako 4y ago
      But what kind of battery impact do you get leaving a long-running connection open?

mcjiggerlog 4y ago

This is really great! I have plenty of uses for this. Here's a quick fish function for being able to call this from a shell like `alt my message` function alt curl -d "\"$argv\"" ntfy.sh/<my topic> end

chasil 4y ago
I would actually do it with an SMS like this. $ cat /bin/awkmail #!/bin/gawk -f BEGIN { smtp="/inet/tcp/0/smtp.yourISP.com/25"; ORS="\r\n"; r=ARGV[1]; s=ARGV[2]; sbj=ARGV[3]; # /bin/awkmail to from subj < in print "helo " ENVIRON["HOSTNAME"] |& smtp; smtp |& getline j; print j print "mail from:" s |& smtp; smtp |& getline j; print j if(match(r, ",")) { split(r, z, ",") for(y in z) { print "rcpt to:" z[y] |& smtp; smtp |& getline j; print j } } else { print "rcpt to:" r |& smtp; smtp |& getline j; print j } print "data" |& smtp; smtp |& getline j; print j print "From: " s |& smtp; ARGV[2] = "" # not a file print "To: " r |& smtp; ARGV[1] = "" # not a file if(length(sbj)) { print "Subject: " sbj |& smtp; ARGV[3] = "" } # not a file print "" |& smtp while(getline > 0) print |& smtp print "." |& smtp; smtp |& getline j; print j print "quit" |& smtp; smtp |& getline j; print j close(smtp) } # /inet/protocol/local-port/remote-host/remote-port $ echo ricki dont lose that number | awkmail 9998675309@vtext.com me@here.com test
- rsync 4y ago
  One issue with carrier email-to-sms gateways is that they truncate messages at a relatively short number of characters. Twilio SMS API, on the other hand, does not have that limit and you can send long SMS messages with a single 'curl' command: /usr/local/bin/curl -s -X POST -d "Body=$msg" -d "From=$from" -d "To=$to" "https://api.twilio.com/2010-04-01/Accounts/$accountsid/Messages" -u "$accountsid:$authtoken" That's simplified - I actually pipeline through 'tidy5' and 'source-highlight' to make the output pleasing: /usr/local/bin/curl -s -X POST -d "Body=$msg" -d "From=$from" -d "To=$to" "https://api.twilio.com/2010-04-01/Accounts/$accountsid/Messages" -u "$accountsid:$authtoken" | tidy5 -xml -iq | source-highlight -s xml -f esc | awk 'xor(/TwilioResponse/,/Message/,/To/,/From/,/Body/,/Status/,/ErrorCode/,/ErrorMessage/)' | grep -v "/2010-04-01/Accounts/"

spuz 4y ago

When I was making my IoT washing machine sensor, I used Blynk.io to push notifications to my phone but of course that service became commercialised and is no longer free. I could not find any nice easy to use alternative except for Telegram which is what I use now. This service looks exactly like what I would need and I appreciate the promise to keep it open source.

lloydatkinson 4y ago
https://pushover.net/ https://pushover.net/ Has existed for several years. It works great for me.
- razemio 4y ago
  Yep. Same for me. Reliable, not subscription based and very easy to integrate. Nothing fancy in a positive manner.
- spuz 4y ago
  Thanks, I may have dismissed Pushover simply because it isn't free but a $5 one time purchase is actually not too bad.
  - KaiserPro 4y ago
    I've used it for a very long time. it does only one thing, and does it well.
  - INTPenis 4y ago
    It's practically free. I bought the app once many years ago and have never sent more than 1000 pushes a month.
- bippingchip 4y ago
  +1 for pushover I’ve been using for quite a fee years. The app is not free but once you pay the one-time fee for the app, they have a generous free tier for personal use, and it has worked quite flawlessly for me so far.

binwiederhier 4y ago

Hey cool, this is my project. Happy to answer questions. Edit: I am also looking for a new opportunity. If you need a good Staff/Principal Engineer, check out my resume here: https://heckel.io/resume.pdf https://heckel.io/resume.pdf

marcus_cemes 4y ago
From the repository that I found, it seems that you wrote the backend in Go. How did it hold up? Any lessons learned?
- binwiederhier 4y ago
  No real lessons learned. I like Go, and I like that it lets me do no-fuzz-straight-to-the-point development. The single Go binary and server is handling the traffic just fine, and the architecture is simple and easy to extend. I am suffering a little right now while I try to add E2E encryption, because I structured the handlePublish logic awkwardly. But other than that there have been no surprises. Sorry that's such a boring answer.
CommitSyn 4y ago
Neat project. Where does the funding come from?
- binwiederhier 4y ago
  It's quite cheap to run. It's just one small EC2 instance, and it's usually idling around a load average of 0.1 (though right now it's at 1, hehe). It costs me about $24/month. The Apple developer license costs $100 per year, so it's ~$400/year. As of recently, that's entirely covered by donations. I am incredibly humbled by the sponsorships. I would have never thought ntfy would take off like that. I love open source and I promise it'll always be free and open (as long as I can reasonably fight of the abusers). If you'd like to help me out me, you can donate via GitHub Sponsors: https://github.com/sponsors/binwiederhier https://github.com/sponsors/binwiederhier

kbns 4y ago

cool. e2e encryption would be great..

binwiederhier 4y ago
End to end encryption is already fully designed and partially implemented. I just had a baby and have no time to do it recently: https://github.com/binwiederhier/ntfy/issues/69 https://github.com/binwiederhier/ntfy/issues/69
- kbns 4y ago
  will check. congratulations.
- shivam543 4y ago
  If I run ntfy behind NGINX reverse proxy which is on https, isn't that E2E encrypted due to https?
  - adamckay 4y ago
    No, because your Nginx server decrypts that TLS connection so can access the plaintext data. This is typically called encrypted-in-transit. E2EE means that it's always encrypted from the sending device to the receiving device and nothing in the middle (including the service operator) can read it.
  - donatzsky 4y ago
    E2E implies that the data itself gets encrypted by the sender and is only decrypted by the receiver. With https, the "pipe" is encrypted, but the data is not and the server will get the plain-text.

freewizard 4y ago

This will be even more useful next year as Apple is said to open the flood gate of iOS web push in 2023

netheril96 4y ago

So the developer just pays for the server and the Apple Developer Program out of his/her own pocket for the public good?

ksidudwbw 4y ago
binwiederhier 4y ago
Correct. Though by now it is covered by donations. This is my hobby. Others buy expensive bikes or cars, I buy Apple Developer licenses. Hehe.
- zackmorris 4y ago
  If money gets tight, you could always sell it for $44 billion

littlethrowaway 4y ago

Wow, this is absolutely fabulous. Thank you very much for making it. Extremely simple to use. Just really well done.

krono 4y ago

From the FAQ[1]: > Will you know what topics exist, can you spy on me? > If you don't trust me or your messages are sensitive, run your own server. This is the way. No pinky promises in whitepaper format[2] that leave out the most important bits, no meticulously constructed but entirely meaningless marketing statements[3][4], but unassuming and deferential logic with a mitigation path. 1: https://ntfy.sh/docs/faq/#will-you-know-what-topics-exist-can-you-spy-on-me https://ntfy.sh/docs/faq/#will-you-know-what-topics-exist-ca... 2: (warning: redirects with identifiers, how ironic) https://www.whatsapp.com/security/WhatsApp-Security-Whitepaper.pdf https://www.whatsapp.com/security/WhatsApp-Security-Whitepap... 3: https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/privacy-report https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/privacy-report 4: https://www.apple.com/privacy/ https://www.apple.com/privacy/

krn 4y ago
Why couldn't the entire system be E2E encrypted by default, though? In 2022, that's my standard expectation from any service. Even such things as Pocket / Instapaper / Raindrop should come with E2E encryption by default. It's better for the service provider, too: no issues with GDPR, or in case of a database hack.
- ilogik 4y ago
  If you don't trust the person that wrote the software, it doesn't matter if it's E2E encrypted or not. There could be a back-door
  - ilyt 4y ago
    which software ? You might have 3rd party client implementation that talks with another client and only server would be "unknown" party. E2E allows both clients to talk to eachother without server having a way to snoop on
  - krn 4y ago
    E2E encryption happens on the client side, not on the server side. Therefore, no need to trust anybody, as long as the software is open-source.

amelius 4y ago

From the build instructions: > You should download Android Studio (or IntelliJ IDEA with the relevant Android plugins). Everything else will just be a pain for you. Do yourself a favor. I'm not into mobile programming, and I wonder what is behind this statement.

atentaten 4y ago
Native mobile apps are typically built using Android Studio and its tooling. On the iOS side, it's Xcode and it's tooling

h43z 4y ago

I sometimes use my little service https://pushurl.43z.one/ https://pushurl.43z.one/ If I need to notify my desktop browser or phone with a notification triggered by some code. I just go to the website with my browser click generate. Then in my script I do `curl $pushurl?title=jobdone`. When it gets triggered a notification popups on my phone that says "jobdone". It uses the native browser web push API so I don't need to install anything extra.

dlivingston 4y ago
Awesome! Using it now. So seamless. Are there any other parameters besides `title`? _edit:_ wrote a little Bash function for this; seems to work well: function notify() { argTitle='TerminalNotification' argText="$1" argUrl='https://www.example.com' baseUrl='https://pushurl.43z.one/XXXXXXXXXXXXX' curl --get \ --data-urlencode "title=$argTitle" \ --data-urlencode "text=$argText" \ --data-urlencode "url=$argUrl" \ $baseUrl }
- h43z 4y ago
  just `title`, `text` and `url` (which will open the specified `url` on notification click)
hu3 4y ago
Neat. I guess you had to visit pushurl.43z.one once with each browser you want to be notified right? I'm just curious.
- h43z 4y ago
  Yes, exactly. The pushurl has to be generated with the browser on the device which you want send notifications to. The pushurl is bound to that browser.
getcrunk 4y ago
Is the code public? Seems simple to implement. But I'd rather copy and paste.

bilinguliar 4y ago

Just what I need. Left 5 star review.

TkTech 4y ago

Keep in mind that ntfy works with a bunch of backends. You can send the notifications to Telegram, jabber/XMPP, IRC (using my own https://n.tkte.ch https://n.tkte.ch), Slack, etc, etc. So, you probably don't have to actually install anything new to receive notifications and can just use what you've already got.

jayrhynas 4y ago
I don't think ntfy.sh does that, but are you talking about https://github.com/dschep/ntfy https://github.com/dschep/ntfy?
- TkTech 4y ago
  You are 100% correct. Boy that's confusing. I thought they'd just gotten a new site!
  - jayrhynas 4y ago
    It looks like you could add ntfy.sh as a backend for dschep/ntfy, but just imagine trying to document that!
    - binwiederhier 4y ago
      When I found out about the name collision, i did: https://github.com/dschep/ntfy/pull/234 https://github.com/dschep/ntfy/pull/234 It apparently never got merged. ;-)

MediumOwl 4y ago

Great C2 channel, thanks!

spsesk117 4y ago

Disclaimer: I know the developer of Ntfy and have worked with them in the past. I love this tool because it sits in a very convenient place in the alerting and monitoring stack. At work the kind of alerting pipelines and frameworks needed can by necessity end up being nontrivial and somewhat sophisticated. If you run some stuff at home or in the cloud or whatever, I have often wanted some kind of simple alerting but never want to deal with mocking out similar systems that I've built at work. Ntfy sits perfectly in this space, and I've used to to frame out my own kind of micro-alerting frameworks for a bunch of stuff that I run. It's incredibly easy to encapsulate in something like a bash TRAP or even || conditionals on random cronjobs, and just makes getting some kind of alerting so trivial. As such, it's spiraled out into a lot of different stuff that I run.

binwiederhier 4y ago
Uhhhh. Who are you? Now I wanna know.

fareesh 4y ago

I made a simple virtual assistant app that does most of this stuff for me (i.e. notifications, two-way communications), with an API that can tie into other small projects - I've always assumed most developers have something like this of their own, i.e. some sort of Jarvis

bityard 4y ago

How does this compare to gotify?

rbut 4y ago

Another good open-source self-hosted alternative is Gotify. https://gotify.net https://gotify.net

pmontra 4y ago
I was adding a new application (i.e. a topic) to on my own instance today. Gotify is Go binary to run with very little configuration. It has an Android app to get somewhat realtime notifications on the phone. Probably an iOS one too. It also has a pretty extensive REST API to manage the instance and a management web app. https://gotify.net/ https://gotify.net/

atentaten 4y ago

Could this potentially replace Firebase Cloud Messaging for push notifications?

kirimita 4y ago
It is an UnifiedPush distributor, so it can replace FCM for applications supporting it. Here are most of the applications supporting UnifiedPush right now: https://unifiedpush.org/users/apps/ https://unifiedpush.org/users/apps/
- binwiederhier 4y ago
  This is the way. UnifiedPush is sllooowly becoming more popular. Element (Matrix chat app) just added official support for it, which is super cool. And you can use ntfy as a distributor.

palata 4y ago

On Android, I have been using it for a while with Unified push: for Tusky (Mastodon client) and Element (Matrix client). Works well, I wish more services were using UnifiedPush (so that I would not need the constant Telegram notification, for instance).

popol12 4y ago

Thanks, I was using twilio free tier to send me some automated SMS, but this is even easier and more efficient !

pfoof 4y ago

Thank you. Finally I don't have to set up some crazy email auth or build a special app to get info from my pipelines or raspberry

binwiederhier 4y ago
You're welcome. Comments like this make me so happy. BTW if you _do_ want to send emails, ntfy can do that too, even without auth (limited to 16 a day though): https://ntfy.sh/docs/publish/#e-mail-notifications https://ntfy.sh/docs/publish/#e-mail-notifications

Havoc 4y ago

That's looking great. I like that the app is listed as not collecting info & self-hosting is an option. Gonna stick this on my home server & add some fw rules to filter out various countries

moss2 4y ago

Suuuuper cool thanks for sharing this. Gonna see if I can use this to push notify when my DNS fails to reach my hobby server cause my ISP has changed my IP.

ed25519FUUU 4y ago

Cool project. Another one I’ve used for this purpose is pushover. It’s a $5 lifetime fee. It’s worked well for me so far. https://pushover.net/ https://pushover.net/

riedel 4y ago
A really easy way to do this is a telegram bot ( if you don't care about E2E and a bit shady business model)
Tepix 4y ago
Can confirm, pushover has been good so far.

st3fan 4y ago

Hey I wrote a similar thing but then to send them to your Watch: https://astronote.app/hello https://astronote.app/hello I recently made it free because I am unable to monetize it. Please give it a try.

uean 4y ago

This is going to change everything for me. Thank you for this software! Exactly what we need for our in house monitoring and alerting.

PUSH_AX 4y ago

I've been using a personal slack instance essentially to do this (leveraging it as a notification centre is actually kind of trivial). I absolutely be looking at this however.

BigBalli 4y ago

I use Twilio SMS API for the same purpose. Great concept but I can't stand cluttering my phone (used to have PushBullet before). I also find SMS more reliable since iOS can throttle push delivery depending on your interactions.

SuperSandro2000 4y ago

This needs account syncing from the backend. You need to describe to every topic in every browser/app/device you use and message deletions are not synced.

binwiederhier 4y ago
Indeed it does. That is the most requested feature after E2E encryption and publishing messages from the app itself. See https://github.com/binwiederhier/ntfy/issues/159 https://github.com/binwiederhier/ntfy/issues/159 and +1 it if you want it too.

MauroIksem 4y ago

This is awesome. Lots of carriers have broke the ability to text phones. It just gets blocked so this is a great work around.

teekert 4y ago

This is great, will add it to my docker-compose.yaml and my scripts! To be clear, if 100 people subscribe to ntfy.sh/mytopic, they all receive this message, right? curl -d "Backup successful :)" ntfy.sh/mytopic I wonder how many people got one when I was testing...

spurgu 4y ago
Correct.
- teekert 4y ago
  So, any nice topics? ;)
  - binwiederhier 4y ago
    There are two useful public topics: https://ntfy.sh/docs/publish/#public-topics https://ntfy.sh/docs/publish/#public-topics - https://ntfy.sh/announcements https://ntfy.sh/announcements for announcements (usually only release announcements) - https://ntfy.sh/stats https://ntfy.sh/stats for daily stats (right before midnight UTC) Note that messages are only cached for 12h server-side, so you'll not see any messages in there mostly. I suggest to just subscribe and see if you like getting these messages.
    - kemyke 4y ago
      Am I understand right that with the knowledge of the topic name I can also publish announcement messages into that "official" topic?
      - binwiederhier 4y ago
        No. There are ACLs to protect them, see https://ntfy.sh/docs/config/#access-control https://ntfy.sh/docs/config/#access-control But for all other topics, yes. Knowing the topic means you can publish to it.

nurettin 4y ago

Honorable mention: I've been a happy pushover customer (not affiliated) All I did was pay $5 several years ago and I still have 10k messages/mo which is good enough for all my automation so far.

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fkld 4y ago

Darn, I came up with this recently and thought the only competitor was pushed.io, I do have a secret ingredient. Time will tell once I’m done

joeevans1000 4y ago
Keep at it... it's important to have multiple options, and I know the OP would likely encourage you to keep at it. Of course, make it open source as they did, if you can. :-)

geocrasher 4y ago

Been using ntfy.sh for a while now, ever since I saw it on HN a couple of years ago or so. It's great for automated server notifications and the like. I even tied it to a web form as an ersatz on-call system.

tasn 4y ago

This is great! I used to just use XMPP for this (so send an XMPP message to myself), but I guess having a push notification can mean you can do more powerful things with it.

Zash 4y ago
But, XMPP is push all by itself already, and works with mobile push notification services where needed.
- tasn 4y ago
  Yeah, that's why I used it. It was simple and awesome! What I meant is that by supporting push notifications directly, you can do things like supporting action buttons, open a link when clicking the notification, etc, rather than just XMPP which was what my solution did.

gkfasdfasdf 4y ago

Very cool! I think notifications could work on android without an app via browser notifications from the website, if they don't already.

Ptchd 4y ago

not sure why "phone" is in the title of this post, but it appears to work well.... I would rather use a E2EE messenger for things like this though (chatting with myself)

TheAceOfHearts 4y ago

Another alternative: you can send notifications to your phone through text messages. Text messages are compatible with email, usually in the form of <number>@<special-provider-url>.

vagrantJin 4y ago
Interesting. Please elaborate.
- onedr0p 4y ago
  Very neat. I just searched and if you have Verizon it's possible via <phonenumber>@vtexts.com don't put dashes in your phone number. You can read more about it below. https://www.verizon.com/about/news/vzw/2013/06/computer-to-phone-text-messaging https://www.verizon.com/about/news/vzw/2013/06/computer-to-p...
- duderific 4y ago
  Not OP but, for a while you could email a message to 5559991212@verizon.net and it would send a text to the phone number 555-999-1212. Not sure if it still works that way though.

areichert 4y ago

Oh dang, just last week I started working on my own version of this [0]. Quite fun to hack on! Been thinking about what could be done to really differentiate. Anyways, it's amazing that this is free! Very clean, very well done... bravo :) [0] https://www.booper.dev/ https://www.booper.dev/

whatwherewhy 4y ago
Don't be discouraged, you have a nice start of a JS API

brap 4y ago

I'm not a hater, I am genuinely curious, how does something like this get to 800 votes on HN and 4.4K stars on GitHub? I mean, it's just... a pub/sub server... using HTTP? With a thin UI for web/mobile? I'm obviously missing something, so what is it? Again, not a hater, even though it may come off like I am, I'm just honestly wondering what makes this special. From first glance it seems like something most devs can hack in an hour or two.

vardump 4y ago
Useful things get votes. Even if they're simple.
wh33zle 4y ago
There is hacking the functionality together in an hour or two and then there is polishing it to the point where it doesn't have rough edges and can easily be used by anyone with terminal experience. Personally, the chosen feature set resonates a lot with me. I like services that don't need accounts f.e. because they are so easy to use.
norenh 4y ago
It is small, simple and does the job. Also seems to have good documentation. What is there not to love about that? Do you know something better that fills the same gap?
sunderous 4y ago
I think the allure comes from solving a very sharp pain point if you're a hobbyist developer or new to mobile dev: push notifications. I don't know about others, but the first time I looked into apps, I could make sense of everything until I got to push notifications. Then it became this insanely complicated rabbit hole with a bunch of companies saying they'd solve it for you for 20 bucks a month or whatever. For something that on the surface sounds like it should be dead simple. So a simple, clean, free way to send a push notification to your phone, that you can use with a web request from anywhere? I can definitely see the mass appeal of that to the millions of people with small projects who don't want to become experts on google/apple's ecosystems just to make some words pop up on their phone.

hannofcart 4y ago

I use Opsgenie for most of the same use cases as this application. They have a free tier too. I keep my alert volumes very low.

mlrhazi 4y ago
Could you share a link to an explanation of how you use Opsgenie this way? Thanks!

__fst__ 4y ago

I use this service all the time to notify me when some long running scripts are finished. Also goes very well together with '''tail -f --pid XXXX /dev/null && curl -d "process is done" https://ntfy.sh/XXXXXXX https://ntfy.sh/XXXXXXX'''

_def 4y ago

On a side note, I'm noticing a lot of apps I install via Fdroid don't work on my phone, they crash immediately, while the play store version works (same for this app). I suspect this is a side effect of me using Lineage OS - does anyone have a clue what might fail there on my phone?

mavci 4y ago

I just tried and very liked it. Thank you so much. I am planning to integrate this service to my Hacker News notification app[1] [1] https://hnn.avci.me https://hnn.avci.me

jaktet 4y ago

Where in the docs does it mention the topic name validation? Is there a character limit? Restricted characters? This looks pretty neat.

Loranubi 4y ago
I was looking for this also.

mig39 4y ago

Why only on Macs with M1 chip? Doesn't work on intel?

dtgriscom 4y ago

I use textbelt.com to send text from my various test processes. It isn't free; it isn't even the cheapest. But, I can send 700 texts for $10, or about 1.5 cents per text. That is less than a second of my salary. Not worth my time to cut the cost further.

tveyben 4y ago

Awsome - Thank you for creating and open sourcing this cool tool!!!

Gazoche 4y ago

Ha! I made something similar with a Telegram bot :) https://github.com/Askannz/nag#http-endpoint https://github.com/Askannz/nag#http-endpoint

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khiqxj 4y ago

I did this 10 years ago by installing Tor on the phone and using a hidden service. It didn't need to be hidden, but it's much more convenient to set up than this while offering superior security with no effort. Actually I2P or something like that is a better way of doing it, just I only had Tor on the phone at the time and I2P is kind of script kiddie tier.

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torstenvl 4y ago

This is great, I just used this to replace a janky IFTTT notifier for when new ALNAV messages come out.

lobota 4y ago

Isn't this twilio 10 years ago?

herpderperator 4y ago

How do the JSON[0] and raw text[1] streams work? Doesn't that require there to be a thread running on the server for every connected client? How does that not become a slowloris attack? [2] [0] https://ntfy.sh/docs/subscribe/api/#subscribe-as-json-stream https://ntfy.sh/docs/subscribe/api/#subscribe-as-json-stream [1] https://ntfy.sh/docs/subscribe/api/#subscribe-as-raw-stream https://ntfy.sh/docs/subscribe/api/#subscribe-as-raw-stream [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slowloris_(computer_security) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slowloris_(computer_security)

binwiederhier 4y ago
Yes, subscribing requires connected clients to keep a connection open. I've tested this with many many thousand sockets and it seems to scale so far. Additionally I limit the number of subscriptions per IP address. So far so good.

thej 4y ago

I have hosted it on fly for $0, for friends and family. It's working very well. https://thejeshgn.com/2022/08/23/self-hosted-mobile-push-notifications-using-ntfy/ https://thejeshgn.com/2022/08/23/self-hosted-mobile-push-not...

techn0rabbit 4y ago

I love your project @binwiederhier. Lately I have migrated my daily driver from LineageOS to e-os (https://e.foundation/e-os/ https://e.foundation/e-os/). Both use microG, but for some Reason I have massive Lag receiving the Push Notifcations on e-os. Seems like it's not really receiving Notifications via Push, but rather via Pull. I'm running my own Instance, however I can rule out that it's a problem on the Server side, as it used to work without any Problems with LineageOS. Do you maybe have any ideas how I could debug that Problem? I've checked the microG app and allowed Push Notifications for ntfy. I've also made sure that Android's Battery Optimization Feature doesn't interfere with ntfy and I got the permanent Notification open (which keeps the ntfy Process running). Of course I've also built my own Android App and I use my own Google Firebase Credentials. I'm kinda lost at the moment, honestly. Would be great if you'd have some ideas how I could figure out what's wrong.

alex-korr 4y ago

I really like this product. Reading the documentation, it's not clear how to set the auth credentials per topic. Any way to clarify this?

binwiederhier 4y ago
There's a detailed description here: https://ntfy.sh/docs/config/#access-control https://ntfy.sh/docs/config/#access-control Though this doesn't work for the public server obviously. The public server doesn't support setting ACLs by users.

no-reply 4y ago

There was some other project for website monitoring / change detection that had nfty integration available. Anybody know ?

binwiederhier 4y ago
Maybe https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io? It has Apprise support, so you can use ntfy through that AFAIK.

mxuribe 4y ago

@binwiederhier I have heard wonderful things about ntfy.sh; kudos! Quick question: if my team and I already "subscribe" to a private matrix room to receive alerts from our automated scripts (which auto-send alerts into said private matrix room)...is there a need for also leveraging ntfy.sh into this type of workflow? Again, much love and respect to this project...I'm just trying to learn. Thanks!