I discovered Pushover while working on my home server, and trying to find a way to send myself notifications about its status on my phone. It’s awesome.

My issue was this. The media server I run streams video to clients around my home, and elsewhere. Those clients, mostly, only have the ability to play x264 video. I wanted to have my home server convert video that might be in another format to x264 automatically, and then I could place it on the media server. My home server, though, is a Raspberry Pi 5, with no hardware support for x264 encoding. This is fine on its own, I really don’t mind waiting for it to transcode at ~0.25x speed, but I had no way to tell when it had finished. For a while I sent myself emails about it. This kind of worked, but often they would end up in spam (being from a no-name domain like mine), and clogged up my email. Enter Pushover. For a one time lifetime license fee you can send yourself as many annoying notifications as your heart desires. And there are so many ways to do it. They have an API for a vast number of languages, which makes sense, because you can send a notification via curl too.

curl -s \
  --form-string "token=APP_TOKEN" \
  --form-string "user=USER_KEY" \
  --form-string "message=hello world" \
  https://api.pushover.net/1/messages.json

It’s really that simple. Now my server can tell me when it’s done. The app and website are well designed and easy to use. You get a limit of 10,000 messages per app, which I would never use (apart from the time my code broke and sent me 1,000 notifications every half hour for the 8 hours I was asleep). They’re even forgiving of API abuse, in my experience. It’s such a useful tool to be able to notify yourself of things in a script. And with curl installed almost everywhere, any device/container with an internet connection and ability to resolve a domain name can do it.

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