What is Mitto?

Mitto by itself is a very tiny and simple notification server specification, node-mitto specifically is one implementation of that, essentially you make simple HTTP POST requests to the server, a client makes simple GET requests to that server and then displays notifcations if there are any.

How does it work?

The Mitto spec is very simple, GET <server>/status should always return status code 200 and nothing else.

GET <server>/notifications should return a simple JSON Object with the current notifications. Seen below:

{
	"<uuid of notification>": {
		"icon": "",
		"text": "",
		"title": "",
		"app_id": "",
		"app_name": "",
		"sub_text": "",
		"sub_title": ""
	}
}

The properties are very obvious. To make new notifications make a POST <server>/new-notification request, with a application/json Content-Type, and the body should just be the Object above, the notification Object itself, and not with the UUID, that would be created by the server.

UUIDs should never appear more than once, meaning the server should keep track of used UUIDs, albeit, they're UUIDs so the chance of a collision is small. Along with this the server should flush the notifications every so often, however the client should keep track of which notifications it has already displayed, as to not display them twice.

A server may also require authorization through the Authorization header, the setup/format for this can vary. In the case of node-mitto, it'll be <auth-user>:<auth-pass>, however this may very well first be encoded to Base64 on other implementations.

Using node-mitto

node-mitto is very simple, simply clone the repo, run npm i, then run the index.js with node index.js, and options will be found in the help menu (--help). Using --listen enables the client mode.

But default values are also displayed below.

Global options

Option	Description	Default
--auth-user	Required username	not set
--auth-pass	Required password	not set
--icons-dir	Path to store cached icons	<OS temp dir>/mitto-icons

Server side only

Option	Description	Default
--key	Path to SSL key	not set
--cert	Path to SSL certificate	not set
--port	Port which the server runs on	7331
--alive-time	How long before a notification gets flushed, in seconds	10
--same-ip-only	Only return notifications made on the same external IP	not set
--rate-limit	Request count before you get rate limited	100
--rate-duration	How long does the rate limit last, in seconds	60
--proxy-icons	Should icons be downloaded and proxied through the server	60
--https-icons	Forces proxied icons to be delivered over HTTPS	60

Client side only

Option	Description	Default
--listen	Full URL to a Mitto instance	not set
--frequency	How often should new notifications be checked for, in seconds	3
--icons	Enables icons in notification, use --no-icons to disable	enabled