Nextcloud Talk Notifications

Overview

• Source: https://nextcloud.com/talk
• Image Support: No
• Attachment Support: No
• Message Character Limits:
  • Body: 32000
• Supported Body Format(s):
  • ✓TEXT
• Build Your Apprise URL

Account Setup

Apprise can post to Nextcloud Talk as a regular user or as a bot.

User Account

The official Nextcloud Talk app will need to be installed. An ‘app password’ (also referred to as ‘device-specific’ password/token) of one member of the chat will need to be created, see the documentation for more information. Don’t forget to disable file system access for this password.

Bot

Bots need Nextcloud Talk 17.1 (Nextcloud 27.1) or newer. Messages are posted under the bot’s name instead of a user’s.

1. A server administrator installs the bot with a shared secret of 40 to 128 characters. The bot needs the response feature so it can post messages. The URL argument is required by the command but Apprise does not use it:

   occ talk:bot:install --feature response \
       "Apprise" "{secret}" "https://localhost"

2. Enable the bot in each conversation it should post to. A moderator can do this from the conversation’s Bots settings, or an administrator can run occ talk:bot:setup {bot_id} {room_id}.

3. Use the conversation token (the last part of the conversation’s link) as the {room_id} in your Apprise URL.

Syntax

Secure connections (via https) should be referenced using nctalks:// where as insecure connections (via http) should be referenced via nctalk://.

Valid syntax is as follows:

• nctalk://{user}:{password}@{hostname}/{room_id}
• nctalk://{user}:{password}@{hostname}:{port}/{room_id}
• nctalks://{user}:{password}@{hostname}/{room_id}
• nctalks://{user}:{password}@{hostname}:{port}/{room_id}

You can post in multiple chats by simply chaining them at the end of the URL.

• nctalk://{user}:{password}@{hostname}:{port}/{room_id1}/{room_id2}/{room_id3}
• nctalks://{user}:{password}@{hostname}:{port}/{room_id1}/{room_id2}/{room_id3}

To post as a bot, drop the user and password and add the bot’s secret:

• nctalk://{hostname}/{room_id}?secret={secret}
• nctalks://{hostname}/{room_id}?secret={secret}
• nctalks://{hostname}:{port}/{room_id1}/{room_id2}?secret={secret}

Parameter Breakdown

Variable	Required	Description
hostname	Yes	The hostname of the server hosting your Nextcloud service.
user	*Yes	The user of the nextcloud service you have set up.
password	*Yes	The password associated with the user for your Nextcloud account.
secret	*Yes	The shared secret of an installed bot. Use it instead of a user and password.
room_id	Yes	The room_id of Nextcloud Talk.
silent	No	Set to yes to post without triggering chat notifications. By default this is set to no.

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

Send a secure nextcloud talk message to the room 93nfkdn3:

# Assuming our {host} is localhost
# Assuming our {user} is user1
# Assuming our (user1) {password} is 12345-67890-12345-67890-12345:
apprise nctalks://user1:12345-67890-12345-67890-12345@localhost/93nfkdn3

Send the same message as a bot instead:

# Assuming our {host} is localhost
# Assuming our bot {secret} is abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789ABCD
apprise -vv -t "Backup completed" -b "The nightly backup is ready." \
   'nctalks://localhost/93nfkdn3?secret=abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789ABCD'

Tip

If your secret contains special characters such as &, +, / or %, URL-encode them (for example & becomes %26).

Header Manipulation

Some users may require special HTTP headers to be present when they post their data to their server. This can be accomplished by just sticking a plus symbol (+) in front of any parameter you specify on your URL string.

# Below would set the header:
#    X-Token: abcdefg
#
# Assuming our {hostname} is localhost
# Assuming our {user} is user1
# Assuming our (user1) {password} is 12345-67890-12345-67890-12345
# We want to notify Room 93nfkdn3
apprise -vv -t "Test Message Title" -b "Test Message Body" \
   "nctalks://user1:12345-67890-12345-67890-12345@localhost/93nfkdn3?+X-Token=abcdefg"

# Multiple headers just require more entries defined:
# Below would set the headers:
#    X-Token: abcdefg
#    X-Apprise: is great
#
# Assuming our {hostname} is localhost
# Assuming our {user} is user1
# Assuming our (user1) {password} is 12345-67890-12345-67890-12345
# We want to notify Room 93nfkdn3
apprise -vv -t "Test Message Title" -b "Test Message Body" \
   "nctalks://user1:12345-67890-12345-67890-12345@localhost/93nfkdn3?+X-Token=abcdefg&+X-Apprise=is%20great"