Notification Nirvana

If you host a lot of services on your home server, it helps to have them send you timely notifications. With ntfy, you can send push notifications to your phone or desktop. By Koen Vervioesem

- By Koen Vervloesem

A monitoring tool, a Docker image updater program, home-automation software, a task list manager, and backup software all share a common requirement: They need a way to send notifications to keep you informed when specific events occur. There are countless ways to send notifications, including emails, instant messages, and push notifications.

In this article, I'll explore ntfy [1] (pronounced “notify”), an open source project that receives alerts via HTTP through a REST API and converts them into push notifications for a smartphone app or a web browser on your desktop. Thanks to this API and its command-line interface, you can even enable your own shell scripts to send push notifications.

Ntfy uses an HTTP publish/subscribe pattern. A sender publishes notifications on a specific topic, defined by the URL segment following the domain, by sending data to a URL via an HTTP POST or PUT request. A receiver subscribes to this topic, which means that ntfy sends the data to the receiver each time a sender publishes a notification on the topic.

By installing ntfy on your own server, you gain complete control over your notifications, without a centralized service such as Google Firebase Cloud Messaging, which is typically used for such applications. You can also try ntfy for free on its public instance. If you don’t want to bother with installing and maintaining ntfy yourself, you can opt for a paid plan offered by the project’s developer.

Preparing the Server

First you need to determine the intended purpose for your ntfy instance. Your mobile app needs to be able to connect to your server to request messages. If you only want to receive notifications on your phone at home while connected to your local network, just installing ntfy on a home server without exposing any ports to the Internet will suffice.