Tag Archives: Notifications

Apprise, Linux HOWTO

Setup Apprise Notifications on Home Assistant

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Introduction

Apprise allows you to notify just about all of the most popular notification services out there. In fact, there were more then 65 supported services at the time of writing this blog. By integrating it into your Home Assistant environment:

  1. You can securely define all of your notification service end points in one easy to manage location. You can even store these endpoints in configuration elsewhere on your network by leveraging the API allowing you to centralize your configuration and/or decouple it.
  2. You don’t have to try to find the specialized Home Assistant integration for a service you use because most likely Apprise already supports it!
  3. All of the notifications are all sent asynchronously; hence everything gets notified at the same time and not one after another.
  4. You can leverage tagging to easily filter the flow of what messages go where (all explained in this blog).
Home Assistant Apprise Overview
Home Assistant Apprise Overview

Apprise In A Nutshell

Let’s start with the basics… Apprise is built around ingesting specifically formatted URLs which provides it everything it needs in order to send a notification. The URLs are structured as {service}://{credentials}. For example, below are a few of the the most popular services based on traffic to it’s wiki page:

  • TelegramFor a Telegram Notification the Apprise URL looks like:
       tgram://{bot_token}/{chat_id}
       You can read more about the structure here
  • DiscordFor a Discord Notification the Apprise URL looks like:
       discord://{WebhookID}/{WebhookToken}
       You can read more about the structure here
  • EMailFor an Email the Apprise URL looks like:
       mailtos://{user}:{password}@{host}
       You can read more about the structure here

Feel free to have a look at all of the supported Apprise notification services and their accompanying URL documentation here. You can optionally also have a look at this blog entry too if you wish to to test your URL outside of Home Assistant.

Home Assistant Integration

URL Based Setup

The following simple Home Assistant package will get you started in your configuration.yaml file:

# inside your configuration.yaml file:
notify:
  name: apprise
  platform: apprise
  # A Hotmail Example:
  url: "mailto://user:pass@hotmail.com"

Next you can create a simple automation that fires off your notification:

# An example automation:
automation:
- alias: "[Interactive] - Sunset Notice"
  trigger:
    platform: sun
    event: sunset

  action:
    service: notify.apprise
    data:
      title: "Good evening"
      message: "This sun is setting."

There are no limits to the number of Apprise URLs you define. The more you identify, the more that get automatically notified when you reference the notify.apprise service. You can identify more then one notification endpoint by simply updating your entry in your configuration.yaml file to look like so:

# inside your configuration.yaml file:
notify:
  name: apprise
  platform: apprise
  url:
    # A Hotmail Example:
    - "mailto://user:pass@hotmail.com"
    # A Slack server:
    - "slack://MY/TOKEN/INFORMATION"
    # A KODI Server
    - "kodi://my.kodi.server.local"

Apprise File Based Configuration Setup

If you leverage the Apprise configuration as an access point of your Home Assistant setup, you have the power to do a lot more customization with your notifications and how they are triggered. Let’s start with what your entry would look like in your configuration.yaml file:

# inside your configuration.yaml file:
notify:
  name: apprise
  platform: apprise
  # use the 'config' keyword
  # configuration file:
  config: /config/apprise.yaml

Now here is what your Apprise configuration file might look like:

# /config/apprise.yaml
# Our Apprise Configuration File leveraging Tagging
#
urls:
  # Set up a email notification
  - "mailtos://user:mysecretpassword@gmail.com":
    - tag: me, family
      to: myuser@gmail.com
    - tag: family
      to: myspouse@gmail.com, mykid@gmail.com

  # Set up a PushBullet notification
  - "pbul://o.jh33GTY7fpMCbl5gsp8Wk6IJOu43AqCC":
    - tag: me, pushbullet
  - "pbul://o.yy44GTY7fpMCbl5gsp6Aw6IJOu43AqDD":
    - tag: spouse, pushbullet

  # Setup our KODI instances and assign them both to the
  # tv tag
  - "kodi://kitchen.pi.lead2gold.local":
    - tag: tv

  - "kodi://livingroom.pi.lead2gold.local":
    - tag: tv

  # Our DevOps team at work
  - "slack://SPECIAL/TOKEN":
    - tag: devops

The above configuration file leverages tagging by assigning 1 or more tags with all of the identified notification end points. This plays a big roll into how you define your automations now.

Now automation might now look like this:

# An example automation to notify everything identified:
automation:
- alias: "[Interactive] - Sunset Notice"
  trigger:
    platform: sun
    event: sunset

  action:
    service: notify.apprise
    data:
      # 'all' is a special keyword that will cause
      # everything to get notified regardless of the
      # tag already associated with it. 
      target: all
      title: "Good evening"
      message: "This sun is setting."

But by leveraging tagging, we can customize our notifications to just address ‘some’ of the endpoints we identified:

# An example automation to notify everything identified:
automation:
- alias: "[Interactive] - Download Completed"
  trigger:
    platform: event
    event_type: nzbget_download_complete

  action:
    service: notify.apprise
    data:
      # Just notify the services that have the tv tag
      # associated with them. This will not notify
      # anything that does not have the identified tag
      # associated with it:
      target: tv
      title: "Download completed!"
      message: "{{trigger.event.data.name}}"

Where things get really cool, is Apprise is smart enough to work our OR‘s and AND‘s.

For cases where you only want to notify entries that have tagA AND tagB associated with them, you would do the following:

#
# Leverage the 'AND' keyword
# ...
action:
  service: notify.apprise
  data:
    # Just notify the services that have the me AND family
    # tag associated with them.
    # This will not notify anything that does not otherwise
    # meet this criteria:
    target: me, family
    title: "Explicitly matching Tags using AND"
    message: "I will only notify myuser@gmail.com defined in the example above."

The more tags you identify that are separated, the more AND’ing (and more restrictive) the check becomes.

For cases where you only want to notify entries that have tagA OR tagB associated with them, you would do the following:

#
# Leverage the 'OR' keyword
# ...
action:
  service: notify.apprise
  data:
    # Just notify the services that have the tv, pushbullet,
    # or me tag associated with them.
    target:
      - me
      - pushbullet
      - tv
    title: "Explicitly matching Tags using OR"
    message: >-
        This triggers on everything except the `devops` Slack post and the
        emails to myspouse@gmail.com and mykid@gmail.com that were defined
        above under the 'family' tag which wasn't identified in the targets

You may have guessed it now, but if you want to combine OR and AND together, you just identify them as such:

#
# Leverage the 'OR' and the 'AND' keyword
# ...
action:
  service: notify.apprise
  data:
    # Just notify the services that have the me AND family tag associated with
    # it.  Also include any services that have the devops tag as well.
    target:
      - me, family
      - devops
    title: "Email myself only and notify Devops on Slack"
    message: >-
        Testing out the AND and OR together

Now you might be asking: Why would I have my DevOps team be part of my Home Assistant configuration? Well the answer to this question makes more sense in the next section.

Apprise Web Based Configuration Setup

Apprise follows a universal configuration and has already been integrated in many other platforms. If you’re using Apprise elsewhere on your network (or with a team), you may have chosen to host a central configuration. This way you can define all of your Apprise URLs in one location (and not have them spread out across your other servers). If you set up tagging appropriately, you’ll be able to notify only the specific endpoints required; nothing more, nothing less. For those taking advantage of the API (a cloud based centralized configuration end point), you just need to point your Home Assistant Configuration to it as http://apprise.server.local:8000/get/{KEY} where {KEY} is what where you set your configuration up as. So your configuration.yaml file might look like this:

# inside your configuration.yaml file:
notify:
  name: apprise
  platform: apprise
  # Retrieve our Apprise configuration from a remote location.
  # with respect to the below, we're using the default `apprise`
  # key/token:
  config: http://apprise.server.local:8000/get/apprise

Credit

This blog took me a very (,very) long time to put together and test! If you like what you see and wish to copy and paste this HOWTO, please reference back to this blog post at the very least. It’s really all I ask. Alternatively, I certainly won’t turn down a coffee if you wish to buy me one! 🙂

Sources

Apprise

Apprise Makes Sending Notifications via the CLI Easy

2 Comments

Introduction

Apprise is a free Python based notification tool that just makes our lives easier. It allows you to interact with just about all of the most popular Notification Services available to us today! I mean right now while writing this blog, there are already 28 supported services you can use! We’re talk about services like Discord, Telegram, Slack, Pushbullet, IFTTT, Amazon Web Service (SNS), Email, etc, etc.

How Does It Work?

You could be sending our system stats via an email from the command line:

# top will print all of the processes running on our Linux system
# Then we pipe that result into apprise and send it in an email:
top -b -n 1 -c | \
   apprise -t "my system stats" mailto://user:password@hotmail.com

Or maybe you’re a Microsoft Windows user! No problem, Apprise is not OS dependent at all! You could still send your services running to your email like so:

# TASKLIST will print all of the services running on our Widows system
# Then we pipe that result into apprise and send it in an email:
TASKLIST /svc ^ \
   apprise -t "my system stats" mailto://user:password@hotmail.com

The tool itself is pretty simple to use:

apprise [Options] [[[URI1] [URI2] ...]

Here are what the options look like:

Option Description
-t, –title TEXT Specify the message title. This field is optional.
-b, –body TEXT Specify the message body. If you don’t specify this value, then STDIN is used instead.
-n, –notification-type TYPE Specify the message type (default=info). The other options are success, warning, and error.
-T, –theme THEME Specify the default theme. This isn’t discussed in this blog entry, but I’ll talk about it soon!
-v, –verbose By default apprise is pretty quiet. By specifying -v (or a few more -vv and -vvv) you can increase the verbosity of the script. This is useful if you’re trying to figure out why a service might not be working for you.

To make a notification you must provide:

  1. One or more Uniform Resource Identifier(s) (URI). These are used to identify and configure Apprise with the service you wish to access (Email, Discord, etc). I’ll explain a more about this in the next section.
  2. A message body to pass along with the notification you’re going to make. This could be piped in from STDIN like in the examples above, or you can pass the message in via the –body (-b) switch.

Note: In the not so distant future, the message body requirement won’t be required for all services as it is today. An example where the body isn’t always necessary is for IFTTT requests. The message body also isn’t required for most home automation services that Apprise may support in the future!

The Apprise Notification URI

The Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) is the magic one-liner configuration that tells Apprise everything it needs to in order to notify your service(s).

Generally URI looks like this:

  • service://user@host:port
  • service://password@host:port
  • service://user:password@host:port
  • service://host:port
  • service://host

We see these every day when we access a website such as https://nuxref.com.

Take an Apprise Email URI for example:

mailtos://nuxref:mypass@gmail.com
  ^         ^      ^       ^
  |         |      |       |
service   login    |   email domain
                   |
               password

In the above example, Apprise knows you want to send an email because of the mailto:// service identified in front. From there it can acquire all of the server information it needs about this service based upon the rest of the URI provided. Email (URI) configuration can get complicated depending on what you want to do… But for most email providers, Apprise makes it really easy! You can read more about email URIs here.

There are other Apprise URIs that are really easy to use too. For example, if you’re on a Microsoft Windows PC, you can use the windows:// URI and send your system a broadcast message without any effort at all:

apprise -t "Apprise Is Awesome" -b "A Windows Notification" windows://

Note: This only works on a Microsoft Windows PC. It also requires you to have the pypiwin32 bundle installed (if you don’t have it already).

If you’re on a Linux PC you can use the gnome:// or kde:// to achieve the same effects as The MS Windows users get:

# Gnome Messages:
apprise -t "Apprise Is Awesome" -b "A Gnome Notification" gnome://

# KDE Messages
apprise -t "Apprise Is Awesome" -b "A KDE Notification" kde://

There are so many supported notification services, and the list continues to grow.

The other advantage of having all of your configuration in a single URI is that can chain them all together. Apprise will notify each and every one you specify with the message you put in place. There is no limit to the number of servers that you specify.

# The below fires off a pushbullet (pbul://) notification
# and an email (mailto://)
apprise -b "visit nuxref.com" \
   mailto://myusername:mypassword@yahoo.com \
   pbul://o.gn5kj6nfhv736I7jC3cj3QLRiyhgl98b

By uniquely mapping services to their own URIs, we can additionally allow for custom options this way too. For example, let’s say we want our email to be text formatted instead of the default html. No problem:

# Send all of our log files in a text based email format:
cat /var/log/messages | apprise -t "Logging" \
   mailtos://nuxref:mypass@gmail.com?format=text

Notification Types

Notification Type Image
info
success
warning
failure

By default all of your notifications are sent as an info message. This comes into play depending on what kind of notification service you’re using. Some services really don’t care, while others will give you a richer experience as a result of knowing the message type.

Notification services like Slack and Telegram can decorate the message you send it with an icon.

Meanwhile other services like SMS Messages (sent from AWS) or Emails won’t use this feature at all.

# The below sends a success message to the general channel on
# slack (slack://):
apprise -b "visit nuxref.com" -t "success" \
   slack:///T1JJ3T3L2/A1BRTD4JD/TIiajkdnlazkcOXrIdevi7F/#general

Note: You will need to build your own URI for your own services that you use. the URIs I use in my example are made up just to demonstrate how it works.

Wait… Exposing My Password On The Command Line Is a Terrible Idea!

I couldn’t agree more! Thankfully Apprise supports configuration files

# Place your URLs into a configuration file in our home directory:
cat << _EOF > ~/.apprise
mailto://myusername:mypassword@yahoo.com
pbul://o.gn5kj6nfhv736I7jC3cj3QLRiyhgl98b
slack:///T1JJ3T3L2/A1BRTD4JD/TIiajkdnlazkcOXrIdevi7F/#nuxref
_EOF

# Now secure the file so no one can peak at what is personal
# to you:
chmod 400 ~/.apprise

# Now we can call apprise and source the file for our service URIs:
# By default apprise looks in ~/.apprise so now the command line
# gets even easier to use (and more secure too!)
apprise -b 'Apprise Rocks!'

# The above command would fire the notification to all 3 of the
# services you identified in the ~/.apprise file.

# If you want to manage multiple files, you can easily do this too
# just use the --config switch on the command line and point to
# your file:
apprise -b 'My Message Body' --config=/path/to/config

Microsoft Windows users could do a similar solution:


# Prepare ourselves a file (use a text editor is more ideal
# then what I'm putting here):
mkdir  %APPDATA%/Apprise
echo "mailto://myusername:mypassword@yahoo.com" > %APPDATA%/Apprise/apprise
echo "pbul://o.gn5kj6nfhv736I7jC3cj3QLRiyhgl98b" >> %APPDATA%/Apprise/apprise
echo "slack:///T1JJ3T3L2/A1BRTD4JD/TIiajkdnlazkcOXrIdevi7F/#nuxref" >> %APPDATA%/Apprise/apprise

# Set permissions on this file at this point if you want

# Now we can call apprise and source the file for our service URIs:
apprise -b 'Apprise Rocks!'

# If you want to manage multiple files, you can easily do this too
# just use the --config switch on the command line and point to
# your file:
apprise -b 'My Message Body' --config=C:\path\to\config

How Do I Get Apprise?

Assuming you’ve got Python (2.7 or 3.x) already installed, then PyPI is probably the best place to go. But if you have pip installed, just could also just do the following:

pip install apprise

That’s it! You’re ready to go!

Sources