ha-notifier

A simple daemon for Linux or macOS which listens for Home Assistant notifications via the REST integration and displays them via notify-send, with rich options.

Requirements

The receiving device needs libnotify, specifically the notify-send command. If you can run which notify-send in a terminal and get a path back, you're good to go.

Setup

Client

Nix Home Manager

I have tested this on my own machine running NixOS with Home Manager via Flakes. Add the input to your flake:

inputs = {
  ha-notifier.url = "github:cvincent/ha-notifier";
};

Then, somewhere in your Home Assistant configuration:

{
  imports = [ inputs.ha-notifier.homeManagerModules.default ];
  services.ha-notifier.enable = true;
}

To customize the port:

{
  imports = [ inputs.ha-notifier.homeManagerModules.default ];
  services.ha-notifier = {
    enable = true;
    port = 1234;
  };
}

This should then run as a systemd user service when you log in. You may need to start it manually when you first install it:

systemctl --user start ha-notifier.service

Home Assistant

Home Assistant needs a REST target to which to send your notifications. In your configuration.yaml, add the following:

notify:
  - name: my_laptop
    platform: rest
    resource: http://[LAN IP]:[port]/notifications
    title_param_name: title
    target_param_name: target
    data:
      data: '{{ data }}'

Pick any name you like. [LAN IP] is the IP of the machine which will be running ha-notifier and receiving notifications. [port] can be any port you like; by default, ha-notifier uses port 8124.

Then you can set up notifications in your automations. Here's an example:

action: notify.my_laptop
metadata: {}
data:
  title: Notification title
  message: Notification message
  data:
    icon: dialog-information
    urgency: 2
    sound: /home/my_laptop/dotfiles/misc/notification.wav
    transient: 1

title is required, everything else may be omitted. For the data parameters:

• icon: See man notify-send. Likely depends on your OS and distribution.
• icon_file: I have not tested this, but try passing an absolute path to an image on your target system and let me know what happens!
• urgency: 0 for low (default), 1 for normal, or 2 for critical.
• sound: I could not get the documented sound-file hint to work. Instead, if aplay is available, you can give an absolute path to a sound file on the target system and it will be played with the notification using aplay.
• transient: Set to 1 for a transient notification. See man notify-send for details.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. This is a very simple Elixir app with very few dependencies. If you're running Nix, the flake includes a devshell that should get you up and running immediately.

Improvements to the flake to support more ways of installing via Nix, and packaging for other distributions, are of course welcome. I wrote this for me, so packaging currently is what I needed both to run it on my own machine and to see if I could learn to package an Elixir app in Nix (I could).

Other potential improvements include more robust support for icons and sounds. Right now sound in particular is a bit of a hack. The source also includes a mostly working DBusNotifier which speaks to DBus directly and therefore would lose the dependency on notify-send (at least on Linux). Unfortunately, I could not get the urgency hint to work, which I think may come down to the Erlang :dbus library not quite marshalling hints properly. I would be fascinated to learn how that might be fixed.