notifications

Notifications

Alerting for the stack, via ntfy — phone push with priority levels, natively supported almost everywhere here, and free without an account.

Why ntfy rather than Discord

Discord has the broadest native support: Uptime Kuma, Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr and Seerr all ship a Discord connector, and Bazarr and SABnzbd reach it through their bundled Apprise. It is a perfectly reasonable pick.

ntfy is chosen here because coverage is effectively identical — every one of those has a native ntfy option too — while the delivery suits alerts. Discord notifications are the ones people mute, and a mute is indistinguishable from working software until the media server has been down for eight hours. ntfy pushes with a priority level and nothing else competes in the channel.

The split that matters more than the vendor: send alerts and send activity to different places, or send only alerts. A channel that pings on every grab, import and subtitle download trains you to ignore it, which costs more than having no alerting at all.

What is configured

Only failure and health events. Grabs, imports, upgrades, renames, application updates and "download complete" are deliberately off.

Service	Events	Route
Sonarr	Health issue, health restored, manual interaction required	Native ntfy connector, priority High
Radarr	Health issue, health restored, manual interaction required	Native ntfy connector, priority High
Prowlarr	Health issue, health restored	Native ntfy connector, priority High
SABnzbd	Failed, disk full, error, quota, new login	Bundled Apprise, ntfys:// URL
Uptime Kuma	Down / up on every monitor	Native ntfy notification

Manual interaction required is worth keeping on: it fires when an import needs a human, which is how a wanted film sits in an _UNPACK_ folder for weeks looking like residue. See Radarr.

SABnzbd's complete event is off on purpose — it is enabled by default and fires on every finished download. disk_full and error are on, which are the ones that mean something.

Not configured: Bazarr (subtitle events are noise) and Seerr (request notifications are a per-user setting, not an operator alert).

Setup

1. Pick a topic name. On the public ntfy.sh server a topic is the only access control: anyone who knows the name can both read your alerts and publish to them. Use a long random one, and keep it out of the repo — this is a public repository, so it belongs in CLAUDE.local.md alongside the other host-specific values.

2. Subscribe. Install the ntfy app (iOS/Android) or open https://ntfy.sh/<topic> in a browser, and subscribe to the topic.

3. *The arrs — Settings > Connect > Add > ntfy:

   Field	Value
   Server URL	https://ntfy.sh
   Topics	your topic
   Priority	High
   Triggers	On Health Issue, On Health Restored, On Manual Interaction Required

   Leave "Include Health Warnings" off to start — warnings include transient indexer blips.

4. SABnzbd — Config > Notifications > Apprise. SABnzbd has no native ntfy or Discord option; its bundled Apprise is the route for both. URL format:

   ntfys://ntfy.sh/<topic>?priority=high
   

   Then untick Completed and tick Failed, Disk full, Errors, Quota, New login.

5. Uptime Kuma — Settings > Notifications > Setup Notification > ntfy. Server https://ntfy.sh, your topic, priority 4-5. Tick "Apply on all existing monitors" and "Default enabled" so new monitors inherit it.

Verifying

Every *arr connector has a Test button, which is the fastest check. To test the Apprise URL format itself without touching SABnzbd's config, Bazarr vendors Apprise and can send one:

docker exec bazarr sh -c "cd /app/bazarr/bin && python3 -c \"
import sys; sys.path.insert(0,'libs')
import apprise
a = apprise.Apprise(); a.add('ntfys://ntfy.sh/<topic>?priority=high')
print(a.notify(title='Test', body='Hello'))\""

If you outgrow ntfy.sh

Self-hosting ntfy is a small Go binary and removes the public-topic problem. One caveat before you plan on it: the iOS app cannot receive push from a self-hosted server directly — Apple push has to originate from ntfy's own infrastructure, so a self-hosted instance needs upstream-base-url pointed back at ntfy.sh to work on iPhones. Android is unaffected. If the phones that matter are iPhones, self-hosting buys less than it looks like.

Links

• ntfy docs · Apprise ntfy syntax