macOS Desktop Notifications

Overview

• Image Support: Yes
• Attachment Support: No
• Message Character Limits:
  • Body: 250
• Supported Body Format(s):
  • ✓TEXT
• Build Your Apprise URL

Account Setup

Display local notifications with terminal-notifier. Version 3 requires macOS 10.14 or later, while version 2 requires macOS 10.10. OS X 10.8 and 10.9 need an older compatible release. Notifications cannot be sent to another computer.

# Make sure terminal-notifier is installed into your system
brew install terminal-notifier

Syntax

Valid syntax is as follows:

• macosx://

You can also choose to set a sound to play (such as default):

• macosx://_/?sound=default

Set sound to any name listed in your Mac’s Sound Preferences.

terminal-notifier versions 2 and 3 use slightly different options. Apprise detects the installed version automatically. You can override it if needed:

• macosx://_/?version=3

Version 2 uses a sender value to identify notifications. Apprise uses its app_id by default, but you can set your own:

• macosx://_/?sender=myapp

Version 3 does not support sender, so it ignores this option.

Troubleshooting

With version 3, run this command if notifications are not authorized or nothing appears:

terminal-notifier -diagnose

It checks permissions, Focus modes, Scheduled Summary, and other common problems. Version 2 does not provide this command.

Note

macOS asks for notification permission once, but an OS upgrade can reset it. The permission belongs to terminal-notifier, not Apprise.

Parameter Breakdown

Variable	Required	Description
sound	No	A sound name listed in your Mac’s Sound Preferences.
image	No	Associate an image with the message. By default this is enabled. Version 2 uses it as the notification icon; version 3 attaches it inside the notification.
click	No	A URL to open when the notification is clicked.
sender	No	Identifies your script to terminal-notifier. Defaults to your Apprise app_id (Apprise, unless you’ve set your own). Only applies to version=2.
version	No	The terminal-notifier version you have installed: 2 or 3. Detected from the program itself when you don’t set it.

Global Parameters

Variable	Description
overflow	Controls messages that exceed a service’s documented limit. The default is upstream. 👉 upstream: Send one message without splitting or truncating it for that limit. 👉 truncate: Keep the portion that fits and discard the rest. 👉 split: Prefer a readable break, fall back to a hard boundary, and send every part in order. Splitting undeclared or structured content is best effort. Use upstream when the body must remain one intact document.
format	This parameter can be set to either text, html, or markdown. Some services support the ability to post content by several different means. The default of this varies (it can be one of the 3 mentioned at any time depending on which service you choose). You can optionally force this setting to stray from the defaults if you wish. If the service doesn’t support different types of transmission formats, then this field is ignored.
verify	External requests made to secure locations (such as through the use of https) will have certificates associated with them. By default, Apprise will verify that these certificates are valid; if they are not then no notification will be sent to the source. In some occasions, a user might not have a certificate authority to verify the key against or they trust the source; in this case you will want to set this flag to no. By default it is set to yes.
redirect	By default, Apprise will follow HTTP redirects (3xx responses) issued by the remote server, matching the behaviour of the underlying requests library. If you want to prevent custom headers and credentials from being forwarded to destinations that differ from the original URL, set this to no. By default it is set to yes.
cto	This stands for Socket Connect Timeout. This is the number of seconds Requests will wait for your client to establish a connection to a remote machine (corresponding to the connect()) call on the socket. The default value is 4.0 seconds.
rto	This stands for Socket Read Timeout. This is the number of seconds the client will wait for the server to send a response. The default value is 4.0 seconds.
emojis	Enable Emoji support (such as providing :+1: would translate to 👍). By default this is set to no. Note: Depending on server side settings, the administrator has the power to disable emoji support at a global level; but default this is not the case.
tz	Identify the IANA Time Zone Database you wish to operate as. By default this is detected based on the configuration the server hosting Apprise is running on. You can set this to things like America/Toronto, or any other properly formated Timezone describing your area.
retry	The number of additional delivery attempts to make after the first failure before giving up. Accepts an integer in the range 0 to 10. The default is 0 (no retries — a single attempt is made). When combined with wait, Apprise pauses the specified number of seconds between each attempt.
wait	The number of seconds to pause between retry attempts. Accepts a decimal value in the range 0.0 to 20.0; integer values are promoted to float automatically. The default is 0.5. This value is only meaningful when retry is greater than zero — a service with retry=0 makes exactly one attempt regardless of the wait value.
optional	When set to yes, a delivery failure for this service is silently absorbed. The overall notify() call still evaluates as true even if this endpoint was unreachable, provided that every required (non-optional) service in the same batch succeeded. Setting this flag does not skip delivery or bypass retry logic — all configured retry attempts are still made before the failure is absorbed. By default this is set to no, meaning every failure is propagated to the caller.

Examples

We can send a notification to ourselves like so:

# Send ourselves a macOS desktop notification
apprise -vv -t "Test Message Title" -b "Test Message Body" \
   "macosx://"

# Send ourselves a macOS desktop notification with the default sound
apprise -vv -t "Test Message Title" -b "Test Message Body" \
   "macosx://_/?sound=default"

# Send ourselves a notification, identifying ourselves as "myapp"
apprise -vv -t "Test Message Title" -b "Test Message Body" \
   "macosx://_/?sender=myapp"

# Send ourselves a notification, forcing terminal-notifier version 3
apprise -vv -t "Test Message Title" -b "Test Message Body" \
   "macosx://_/?version=3"