NTFY is a great open-source push notification service that’s self-hostable or free to use (although I suggest you pay for it as I do). I’ve written before how I use it with UptimeKuma for my uptime monitoring, but another common use is just when I’m initiating long-running commands and backgrounding them.

This magic is possible since we can just curl to send a NTFY notification. For example:

curl -d "😀 demo push message via NTFY" ntfy.sh/blog_demo

Since I’m subscribed to the “blog_demo” topic in NTFY, this message will be pushed to my phone and watch:

My VPS’s are usually locked down so just ports 80 & 443 (for web server) and 22 (for ssh) are open. That’s great for reducing the attack surface, but having ssh open is a potentially disastrous vulnerability. For this reason I often close that at the cloud firewall level as well, but it has to be open when I’m making changes or running the weekly ansible update/cleanup playbooks.

Uptime Kuma is a monitoring tool suitable for self-hosting, and as well as being a good tool for monitoring the status of your network and applications, it’s a nice smallish app to get started on Docker containers.

Since it’s in a container, you need to create a volume for it and pass it in to persist your settings. Then it’s just a matter of adding each item you want to monitor. There’s a heap of fancy options for this, the only three I’ve used are ping - just pings an address, http(s) - requests a page and checks the header for a 200, and http(s) keyword - looks at the returned page for a keyword in the html.