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Chris Caron edited this page Mar 9, 2024 · 16 revisions

📣 Apprise Configuration

Configuration allows you to identify all of your notification services in one or more secure spots.

There are 2 supported formats:

  • TEXT: Super basic and easy to use.
  • YAML: A wee bit more complicated (when comparing to TEXT) but offers you much more flexibility.

Configuration URLs

Whether loading your Apprise configuration from the command line or the Python framework, they also work in the form of URLs too. This allows for URL location endpoints to extend further then what is currently already supported in the future.

Today, the following configuration URLs are supported:

URL Description
file:// Reads the configuration from a file accessible locally from whence the directory you're standing in when using Apprise. You can specify an absolute path such as file:///etc/config/apprise.yaml or a relative one such as file://var/config.txt.

The file extension associated with your configuration file plays a role in how it is interpreted. Configuration files ending with .yml and .yaml are assumed to be YAML based while anything else is assumed to be TEXT based.

Note: The file:// is assumed to be the default schema used in your configuration URL (even if you didn't specify it). Hence Apprise will also just accept the path as-is such as /absolute/path/to/apprise.cfg or relative/path/to/config.yaml.
http:// and https:// Retrieves your configuration from a web server (via the HTTP protocol). An example of this might be: http://localhost/apprise/ or https://example.com/apprise/config.

The server response plays a key role in how Apprise interprets the data content. The Content-Type residing in the Response Header must identify contain one of the following:

YAML based:
- text/yaml
- text/x-yaml
- application/yaml
- application/x-yaml

TEXT based:
- text/plain
- text/html

Note: Apprise always makes a POST to the server(s) in question. All content returned should be encoded as UTF-8.

Configuration Format Override

You can always over-ride the Apprise configuration detection process (whether it is YAML or TEXT formatted) by simply adding ?format=text or ?format=yaml to the end of your configuration URL. This will enforce that the configuration polled is to be interpreted in a specific way. For example:

  • file:///etc/apprise/caronc.cfg?format=yaml : This forces what would have otherwise been interpreted as a TEXT file (because of the extension) to be interpreted as a YAML one.
  • http://localhost/my/apprise/config?format=text: Force the processing of the web response to be a TEXT base configuration.

Apprise API

There is an Apprise API built for hosting your configuration on the cloud; check it out here. This is a great cloud solution for centralizing your configuration on your network so it is accessible from anywhere.

CLI

To get started you can check out this dedicated wiki page on the CLI. The following lines work really with the command line:

  • --config (-c): so you can manually load configuration files and process the notification URLs from there. You only need to provide this option if you don't have a configuration file already set up in the default search paths (explained below).
  • --tag (-g): so you can filter what you notify by the label you assigned to them.

If the Apprise CLI tool is executed without any notification URLs or Configuration based ones specified, then the following local files are tested to see if they exist and can be processed:

  • ~/.apprise
  • ~/.apprise.conf
  • ~/.apprise.yml
  • ~/.apprise.yaml
  • ~/.config/apprise
  • ~/.config/apprise.conf
  • ~/.config/apprise.yml
  • ~/.config/apprise.yaml

Global Configuration Reference is also supported:

  • /etc/apprise
  • /etc/apprise.conf
  • /etc/apprise.yml
  • /etc/apprise.yaml
  • /etc/apprise
  • /etc/apprise/apprise.conf
  • /etc/apprise/apprise.yml
  • /etc/apprise/apprise.yaml

Microsoft Windows users can find the configuration path as:

  • %APPDATA%/Apprise/apprise
  • %APPDATA%/Apprise/apprise.conf
  • %APPDATA%/Apprise/apprise.yml
  • %APPDATA%/Apprise/apprise.yaml
  • %LOCALAPPDATA%/Apprise/apprise
  • %LOCALAPPDATA%/Apprise/apprise.conf
  • %LOCALAPPDATA%/Apprise/apprise.yml
  • %LOCALAPPDATA%/Apprise/apprise.yaml

Note: The configuration locations identified above are ignored if a --config (-c) argument is specified.

CLI Examples:

Here are some simple examples:

# The following will only send notifications to services that has the
# `tv` tag associated with it.
apprise -vvv -b "Notify only Kodi's in house" --tag=tv

You can also get your configuration from a web server:

# website
apprise -vvv --config=https://myserver/my/apprise/config -b "notify everything"

# you can specify as many --config (-c) lines as you want to add more
# and more notification services to be handled:
apprise -vvv --config=https://myserver/my/apprise/config \
 --config=/a/path/on/the/local/pc -b "notify everything"

# Remember to tag everything because the most powerful feature is to
# load all of your services but only trigger the specific ones you're
# interested in notifying:
apprise -vvv --config=https://myserver/my/apprise/config \
 --config=/a/path/on/the/local/pc \
 -b "notify urls tagged with my-admin-team only" \
 --tag=my-admin-team

Developers

For developers, there is a new object called AppriseConfig() which works very similar to the AppriseAsset() object. It's just anothr object that can be easily consumed by the Apprise() instance.

Up until now, you would add URLs to Apprise like so:

from apprise import Apprise

# Our object
a = Apprise()

# Add our services (associate a tag with each)
a.add('mailto://user:pass@hotmail.com', tag='email')
a.add('gnome://', tag='desktop')

# This command actually won't notify anything because tags were associated
# with our URLs
a.notify("A message!", title="An Optional Title")

# This however will notify all of them.  It uses the special keyword 'all'
# which disregards any tag names set.
a.notify("A message!", title="An Optional Title", tag="all")

# To notify specific URLs that were loaded, you can match them by their
# tag; the below would only access out mailto:// entry:
a.notify("A message!", title="An Optional Title", tag="email")

Well this is how little your code has to change with configuration:

from apprise import AppriseConfig

# Create an AppriseConfig() object
config = AppriseConfig()

# Similar to the Apprise() we add our configuration paths

# Add a configuration file by it's local path
config.add('/local/path/on/your/server/config')

# Same as the above, except it's a good idea to get in the
# habit of locating local files with the file:// prefix.
config.add('file://~.apprise')

# URLs work too http:// an https://
config.add('http://localhost/my/apprise/config/url/path')
config.add('http://example.com/config')

# ---
# Our new config object can be simply added into our apprise
# instance as though it were another notification service
# it were a notification service:
a.add(config)

# Send off our all of our notifications
a.notify("A message!", title="An Optional Title")

# filter our notifications by those associated with the
# devops tag:
a.notify(tag="devops")

🏷️ Tagging from the CLI:

Tagging (with the --tag= (or -g) allows you to only notify entries from the configuration you defined that you want to. You could define hundreds of entries and through tagging, just notify a few (or if any at all).

# assuming you got your configuration in place; tagging works like so:
apprise -b "has TagA" --tag=TagA
apprise -b "has TagA OR TagB" --tag=TagA --tag=TagB

# For each item you group with the same --tag value is AND'ed
apprise -b "has TagA AND TagB" --tag="TagA, TagB"
apprise -b "has (TagA AND TagB) OR TagC" --tag="TagA, TagB" --tag=TagC

Reserved Tags

The following special tags are reserved for use

Tag Usage Description
always config If you store an Apprise entry in a config file and associate the always tag with it, it will ALWAYS be notified regardless of any tagging restriction you place on the CLI
all notifications When performing a notification, you always have the ability to filter which services are notified based on the tags you've assigned them. However if you perform a notification and indicate that you want to notify and are filtering on the all tag, absolutely everything will be notified (regardless of what other tags have been assigned to it).

It's also worth noting that if you do not assign a tag to an Apprise configuration entry, it can only be actioned/notified if the call to Apprise also does not identify a tag to filter on. However un-tagged configuration entries will be always included in all references.

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