How to send yourself a native push notification (the easy way)

The shortest way to send yourself a native push notification is one HTTP request to a personal URL. No app to build, no Firebase, no backend. Here is the whole thing:

curl "https://hooknotifier.com/{IDENTIFIER}/{KEY}?object=Hello&body=My first notification"

Call that, and a real notification shows up on your phone and in your browser. That is it.

Why this is harder than it should be

You want a notification when something happens. A user signs up. A payment fails. A script finishes. A site goes down.

It sounds simple. It is not.

To send a real native push notification yourself, you normally have to:

• Set up Firebase Cloud Messaging, or Apple Push Notification service.
• Register device tokens and keep them in sync.
• Run a backend to hold the tokens and send the messages.
• Build an app to receive them.

That is a lot of plumbing for "ping my phone when X happens". So most people give up and bricole something. A Telegram bot. A Discord webhook. An email that gets buried. Anything to avoid building the real thing.

Hook.Notifier is the real thing, ready to use. You get the inbox and the app. You just call a URL.

The three steps

1. Get your URL

Create a free account. You get two values, your identifier and your key. They form your personal hook:

Your hook: https://hooknotifier.com/{IDENTIFIER}/{KEY}

2. Call it

Any tool that can make an HTTP request can send you a notification. The simplest is a browser or curl:

curl "https://hooknotifier.com/{IDENTIFIER}/{KEY}?object=Deploy%20done&body=Production%20is%20live"

The hook accepts both GET and POST. That means you can paste the URL straight into a browser tab to fire your first notification, no terminal needed.

3. Get notified

The notification lands on your phone if the mobile app is installed, and in your browser inbox either way. It stays there, so you can come back to it.

Send from anything

You only need to make an HTTP request, so almost anything works.

From a shell script or a cron job:

./backup.sh && curl "https://hooknotifier.com/{IDENTIFIER}/{KEY}?object=Backup&body=Backup%20finished"

From a few lines of Python:

import requests

requests.post("https://hooknotifier.com/{IDENTIFIER}/{KEY}", json={
    "object": "New signup",
    "body": "Someone just created an account",
})

From a webhook. Stripe, GitHub, Cal.com, Supabase, your own app. If it can POST to a URL when an event happens, it can notify you. Paste your hook as the webhook URL and you are done.

From a no-code tool. In Zapier or Make, add a webhook action, point it at your hook, and map the fields.

The parameters

You can shape the notification with a few parameters.

It goes further

The basics above are enough for most pings, but the same URL takes more:

• priority=low|normal|high|critical. Low lands in your inbox without pushing your phone. High and critical cut through your quiet hours.
• delay=10m (30s, 2h, 1d...) or at= an ISO date schedules the send, up to 3 days ahead.
• markdown=true renders the body as markdown.
• actions adds up to 3 buttons ([{"label", "url"}] as JSON in a POST), shown in the inbox and the app.

Every send returns {"status":"ok","id":42}. A PUT to the same URL plus /42 updates that notification in place, so a long job can be one notification that goes from "running" to "done" instead of a pile of pings.

Prefer to build it visually?

Use the query builder below to compose your notification and get a ready to copy URL. You will also find it in your dashboard.

Build your notification

Fill in the fields to get a ready to copy hook. You can send it to yourself right away to test it.