Apprise not installed during fresh install?

[TheMangrove]

I recently setup a birdnet installation following the instructions on a Pi-4B.

I'm trying to setup MQTT notifications to home assistant, however when I send test messages, nothing is registered on the MQTT server and MQTT Explorer doesn't see any topic or messages associated with Birdnet.

If I run the following command in terminal:

apprise -V

I get the output:

-bash: apprise: command not found

Does this mean apprise wasn't installed with the default installation instructions? Is there anything special I need to do to install apprise manually?

[TheMangrove]

Update:

If I try the steps described in this thread

I get

birdnet:~/BirdNET-Pi$ source ./birdnet/bin/activate

(birdnet) birdnet:~/BirdNET-Pi$ pip3 install --upgrade apprise
Requirement already satisfied: apprise in ./birdnet/lib/python3.13/site-packages (1.9.5)
Requirement already satisfied: requests in ./birdnet/lib/python3.13/site-packages (from apprise) (2.32.5)
Requirement already satisfied: requests-oauthlib in ./birdnet/lib/python3.13/site-packages (from apprise) (2.0.0)
Requirement already satisfied: click>=5.0 in ./birdnet/lib/python3.13/site-packages (from apprise) (8.3.1)
Requirement already satisfied: markdown in ./birdnet/lib/python3.13/site-packages (from apprise) (3.10)
Requirement already satisfied: PyYAML in ./birdnet/lib/python3.13/site-packages (from apprise) (6.0.3)
Requirement already satisfied: certifi in ./birdnet/lib/python3.13/site-packages (from apprise) (2025.11.12)
Requirement already satisfied: charset_normalizer<4,>=2 in ./birdnet/lib/python3.13/site-packages (from requests->apprise) (3.4.4)
Requirement already satisfied: idna<4,>=2.5 in ./birdnet/lib/python3.13/site-packages (from requests->apprise) (3.11)
Requirement already satisfied: urllib3<3,>=1.21.1 in ./birdnet/lib/python3.13/site-packages (from requests->apprise) (2.5.0)
Requirement already satisfied: oauthlib>=3.0.0 in ./birdnet/lib/python3.13/site-packages (from requests-oauthlib->apprise) (3.3.1)

This would suggest apprise is installed, so my issue might be something else.

I'm following this guide

If I try manually sending a test notification using the following command:

apprise -vvv -b 'test' "mqtt://user:password@192.168.1.3:1883/birdnet/sightings"

The message works and is picked up by MQTT Explorer. So it would appear that something else is not working.

[TheMangrove]

OK, I figured it out.

The issue was a comma in the excluded species list.

Under the setting:
Exclude these species (comma separated common names):

If I have a comma after the last species:

American Crow, Mourning Dove, Blue Jay, Canada Goose, Mallard,

MQTT notifications will not work.

If the comma is not there:

American Crow, Mourning Dove, Blue Jay, Canada Goose, Mallard

MQTT notifications work

I don't know if this is a bug, or intended behaviour, but it might be worth making note of that somewhere, or possibly filtering the input to remove a comma with nothing behind it.

[Nachtzuster]

You found a 2.5 year old bug :-)

Thanks for the report and investigation!
I pushed a fix.