tgsend

Push a line of text from any script to your Mac's notification centre — through a server you run yourself, with no third party in the middle.

Download for macOS Linux ARM64 CLI

Free · signed and notarized by Apple · macOS 13 or later

Two halves

tgsend — a command line sender. Takes a message as arguments or on standard input and publishes it over HTTPS. Every notification is titled with the sending machine's hostname, so you know which box is talking.
Tgsend.app — a native macOS menu bar receiver. Subscribes to your topic, shows native notifications, keeps the last ten messages, and stores its token in the Keychain rather than a config file.

Why it exists

Long jobs finish while you are elsewhere: a backup, a build, a deploy, a scan. Sending yourself a line of text is the simplest way to know. Doing that through a commercial push service means your operational messages pass through someone else's servers.

tgsend talks to ntfy, which you can self-host. Your messages go from your machine to your server to your Mac. Nothing else is involved.

Using it

Point the sender at your server by writing config.json in ~/Library/Application Support/tgsend/ on macOS, or ~/.config/tgsend/ on Linux:

server_url	https://notify.example.com
topic	your private topic
token	a publisher token

Then send:

tgsend --title "Deploy" "api is live"

restic backup / | tgsend --priority high

The Mac app asks for the same three values on first launch and keeps the token in the Keychain.

What you need

Server	An ntfy instance you control, or ntfy.sh
macOS	13 or later, Apple Silicon or Intel
Linux	ARM64, static binary, no runtime

tgsend is free and comes with no warranty. It is a tool I built for my own machines and published because it might save someone else the afternoon.