ntfy

ntfy (pronounce: notify) is a super simple pub-sub notification service. It allows you to send desktop and (soon) phone notifications via scripts. I run a free version of it on ntfy.sh. No signups or cost.

Usage

Subscribe to a topic

You can subscribe to a topic either in a web UI, or in your own app by subscribing to an SSE/EventSource, or a JSON or raw feed.

Here's how to see the raw/json/sse stream in curl. This will subscribe to the topic and wait for events.

# Subscribe to "mytopic" and output one message per line (\n are replaced with a space)
curl -s ntfy.sh/mytopic/raw

# Subscribe to "mytopic" and output one JSON message per line
curl -s ntfy.sh/mytopic/json

# Subscribe to "mytopic" and output an SSE stream (supported via JS/EventSource)
curl -s ntfy.sh/mytopic/sse

You can easily script it to execute any command when a message arrives. This sends desktop notifications (just like the web UI, but without it):

while read msg; do 
  notify-send "$msg"
done < <(stdbuf -i0 -o0 curl -s ntfy.sh/mytopic/raw)

Publish messages

Publishing messages can be done via PUT or POST using. Here's an example using curl:

curl -d "long process is done" ntfy.sh/mytopic

Messages published to a non-existing topic or a topic without subscribers will not be delivered later. There is (currently) no buffering of any kind. If you're not listening, the message won't be delivered.

FAQ

Isn't this like ...?

Probably. I didn't do a whole lot of research before making this.

Can I use this in my app?

Yes. As long as you don't abuse it, it'll be available and free of charge.

What are the uptime guarantees?

Best effort.

Why is the web UI so ugly?

I don't particularly like JS or dealing with CSS. I'll make it pretty after it's functional.

TODO

• rate limiting / abuse protection
• release/packaging
• add HTTPS

Contributing

I welcome any and all contributions. Just create a PR or an issue.

License

Made with ❤️ by Philipp C. Heckel, distributed under the Apache License 2.0.