Send push notifications to your phone or desktop via PUT/POST
ntfy (pronounce: notify) is a simple HTTP-based pub-sub notification service. It allows you to send notifications to your phone or desktop via scripts from any computer, entirely without signup, cost or setup. It's also open source if you want to run your own.
There are many ways to use it: Notify yourself when a build finishes, when an rsync is done or a backup fails, or know when somebody logs into your server. There are many more examples, endless possibilities 😀.
Publishing messages
Publishing messages can be done via PUT or POST. Topics are created on the fly by subscribing or publishing to them. Because there is no sign-up, the topic is essentially a password, so pick something that's not easily guessable.
Here's an example showing how to publish a message using a POST request (via curl -d):
curl -d "Backup successful 😀" ntfy.sh/mytopic
There are more features related to publishing messages: You can set a notification priority, a title, and tag messages. Here's an example using all of them:
curl \
-H "Title: Unauthorized access detected" \
-H "Priority: urgent" \
-H "Tags: warning,skull" \
-d "Remote access to $(hostname) detected. Act right away." \
ntfy.sh/mytopic
Subscribe to a topic
You can create and subscribe to a topic either using your phone, in this web UI, or in your own app by subscribing via the API.
Subscribe from your phone
Simply get the app and start publishing messages. To learn more about the app, check out the documentation.
Subscribe in this Web UI
Subscribe to topics here and receive messages as desktop notification. Topics are not password-protected, so choose a name that's not easy to guess.
Subscribe using the API
There's a super simple API that you can use to integrate your own app. You can consume a JSON stream, an SSE/EventSource stream (useful for web apps), as well as a plain text stream.
Here's an example for JSON. Note that the connection stays open, so you can retrieve messages as they come in:
$ curl -s ntfy.sh/mytopic/json
{"id":"SLiKI64DOt","time":1635528757,"event":"open","topic":"mytopic"}
{"id":"hwQ2YpKdmg","time":1635528741,"event":"message","topic":"mytopic","message":"Hi!"}
{"id":"DGUDShMCsc","time":1635528787,"event":"keepalive","topic":"mytopic"}
...
More, more, more!
ntfy has so many more features and you can learn about all of them in the documentation (I tried my very best to make it the best docs ever 😉, not sure if I succeeded, hehe).
Forever free, forever 100% free software
I love free software, and I'm doing this because it's fun. I have no bad intentions, and I will never monetize or sell your information. This service will always stay free and open. You can read more in the FAQs and in the privacy policy.