I want to quickly share a little gem of a tool that I have been using for some time now. It's a cute, simple notification tool, and I think it's invaluable for anyone that does any form of self-hosting, but could potentially also be useful in small organizations.

What is ntfy ?

In simple terms, it's a utility that will let you send and receive notifcations via HTTP(S). You can create different "topics" (basically feeds) to subscribe to, and impose access control on each topic using accounts and api-keys (or forego it altogether, and have it be a public channel). You can learn more about the project on its website.

It has a bunch of delivery mechanisms you can hook it up to as the web app, text messages, phone calls, and my favorite, the mobile app.

The Mobile App

What makes ntfy worth having for me, has to be the fact that it has a mobile application that can be found on both Android and iOS platforms.

This means you can hack any of your existing services to use ntfy and delivery push notifications to your mobile device, giving a quasi-native app experience.

There is one caveat, though. If you're reading this, you're most likely interested in running the service yourself. This means that you will need to re-compile the mobile applications yourself.

Well, technically you don't have to. But an important aspect of notifications is their availability and punctuality. Who wants a notification that's an hour late?

The TL;DR is, you need to compile it yourself in order to let your device use dedicated polling utilities to efficiently listen for incoming notifications.

Some Usecases

Here's some ideas for how to use ntfy:

1. Server health checks
2. Custom email notifications
3. Content feed monitoring
4. Bonus: My absolute favorite way to use ntfy is as a cross-platform clipboard.