Self-Host Gotify: Real-Time Push Notifications 2026

TL;DR

Gotify (MIT, ~10K GitHub stars, Go) is a self-hosted push notification server with a web UI, Android app, and REST API. Unlike ntfy (topic-based pub/sub), Gotify uses an application/client model — create an app, get a token, send messages. Gotify keeps a persistent message history you can browse in the web UI or query via API. Pushover charges $5 one-time per platform; Gotify is free with no limits.

Key Takeaways

• Gotify: MIT, ~10K stars, Go — push notifications with persistent message history
• Application model: Create apps (senders) and clients (receivers) — organized, not anonymous topics
• Web UI: Browse message history, manage apps, configure settings in a clean interface
• Android app: Native app with WebSocket real-time delivery — no polling delay
• REST API: Simple token-based API for sending messages from any script or service
• vs ntfy: Gotify has persistent history and web UI; ntfy has simpler sending syntax and iOS app

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Gotify vs ntfy vs Pushover

Feature	Gotify	ntfy	Pushover
Sending model	App tokens	Topic URLs	API keys
Message history	Yes (persistent)	Brief cache	No
Web UI	Yes	No	No
iOS app	No (web only)	Yes	Yes
Android app	Yes (native)	Yes (native)	Yes
Self-hosted	Yes	Yes	No (cloud)
WebSocket	Yes	Yes	No
Price	Free	Free	$5 one-time

---

Part 1: Docker Setup

# docker-compose.yml
services:
  gotify:
    image: gotify/server:latest
    container_name: gotify
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "8080:80"
    volumes:
      - gotify_data:/app/data
    environment:
      GOTIFY_DEFAULTUSER_NAME: admin
      GOTIFY_DEFAULTUSER_PASS: "${ADMIN_PASSWORD}"
      GOTIFY_SERVER_PORT: 80
      GOTIFY_SERVER_KEEPALIVEPERIODSECONDS: 0
      GOTIFY_SERVER_LISTENADDR: ""
      GOTIFY_SERVER_SSL_ENABLED: "false"
      GOTIFY_DATABASE_DIALECT: sqlite3
      GOTIFY_DATABASE_CONNECTION: "data/gotify.db"
      GOTIFY_PASSSTRENGTH: 10
      GOTIFY_UPLOADEDIMAGESDIR: "data/images"
      GOTIFY_PLUGINSDIR: "data/plugins"
      GOTIFY_REGISTRATION: "false"   # Disable public signup
      TZ: America/Los_Angeles

volumes:
  gotify_data:

docker compose up -d

Visit http://your-server:8080 → log in with admin credentials.

---

Part 2: HTTPS with Caddy

gotify.yourdomain.com {
    reverse_proxy localhost:8080
}

---

Part 3: Create Apps and Send Messages

Create an application

1. Apps → Create Application
2. Name: Home Server, Monitoring, CI Pipeline
3. Description: optional
4. → Create → copy the App Token

Send a notification

APP_TOKEN="your-app-token"
BASE="https://gotify.yourdomain.com"

# Simple message:
curl -X POST "$BASE/message" \
  -H "X-Gotify-Key: $APP_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "title": "Backup Complete",
    "message": "nightly backup finished successfully",
    "priority": 5
  }'

# Or via form data (simpler):
curl -X POST "$BASE/message?token=$APP_TOKEN" \
  -F "title=Backup Complete" \
  -F "message=Finished at $(date)" \
  -F "priority=5"

Priority levels

Priority	Behavior (Android)
0	Silently update badge
1-3	Low — quiet notification
4-7	Normal — default notification
8-10	High — loud, stays visible

---

Part 4: Android App

1. Install Gotify Android from F-Droid or GitHub releases
2. + Add server:
   • URL: https://gotify.yourdomain.com
   • Username + password
3. Real-time WebSocket connection — notifications arrive instantly

Client token vs App token

• App token: Used by senders to POST messages
• Client token: Used by the Android app to receive messages (auto-created when you log in)

---

Part 5: REST API

BASE="https://gotify.yourdomain.com"

# Authenticate (get client token):
curl -X POST "$BASE/client" \
  -u admin:password \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"name": "my-script"}'

# List all messages:
curl "$BASE/message" \
  -u admin:password | jq '.messages[].message'

# Delete a message:
curl -X DELETE "$BASE/message/42" \
  -u admin:password

# Delete all messages for an app:
curl -X DELETE "$BASE/application/APP_ID/message" \
  -u admin:password

# List applications:
curl "$BASE/application" \
  -u admin:password | jq '.[] | {id, name, token}'

# Real-time stream (WebSocket):
# Connect to: wss://gotify.yourdomain.com/stream?token=CLIENT_TOKEN

---

Part 6: WebSocket Real-Time Stream

Subscribe to real-time notifications via WebSocket:

// Browser JavaScript:
const ws = new WebSocket(
  "wss://gotify.yourdomain.com/stream?token=CLIENT_TOKEN"
);

ws.onmessage = (event) => {
  const msg = JSON.parse(event.data);
  console.log(`[${msg.appid}] ${msg.title}: ${msg.message}`);
  
  // Show browser notification:
  new Notification(msg.title, { body: msg.message });
};

# Python:
import websocket
import json

def on_message(ws, message):
    msg = json.loads(message)
    print(f"[{msg['appid']}] {msg['title']}: {msg['message']}")

ws = websocket.WebSocketApp(
    "wss://gotify.yourdomain.com/stream?token=CLIENT_TOKEN",
    on_message=on_message
)
ws.run_forever()

---

Part 7: Integrations

Uptime Kuma

1. Uptime Kuma → Notifications → Add → Gotify
2. Server URL: https://gotify.yourdomain.com
3. Token: your app token
4. Priority: 8

Grafana

# Grafana → Contact Points → Webhook
URL: https://gotify.yourdomain.com/message?token=APP_TOKEN
Method: POST
Content-Type: application/json
Body template:
{
  "title": "Grafana Alert: {{ .GroupLabels.alertname }}",
  "message": "{{ range .Alerts }}{{ .Annotations.summary }}{{ end }}",
  "priority": 8
}

Cron notifications

#!/bin/bash
# /usr/local/bin/cron-notify.sh
# Usage: cron-notify.sh "App token" "Job name" command [args...]

TOKEN="$1"
JOB="$2"
shift 2

OUTPUT=$("$@" 2>&1)
EXIT_CODE=$?

if [ $EXIT_CODE -ne 0 ]; then
  curl -s -X POST "https://gotify.yourdomain.com/message?token=$TOKEN" \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -d "{
      \"title\": \"Cron Failed: $JOB\",
      \"message\": \"Exit code: $EXIT_CODE\n$OUTPUT\",
      \"priority\": 8
    }"
fi

Watchtower Docker updates

services:
  watchtower:
    image: containrrr/watchtower
    environment:
      WATCHTOWER_NOTIFICATIONS: gotify
      WATCHTOWER_NOTIFICATION_GOTIFY_URL: "https://gotify.yourdomain.com/"
      WATCHTOWER_NOTIFICATION_GOTIFY_TOKEN: "your-app-token"

Home Assistant

# configuration.yaml
notify:
  - platform: rest
    name: gotify
    resource: "https://gotify.yourdomain.com/message"
    method: POST_JSON
    headers:
      X-Gotify-Key: "your-app-token"
    message_param_name: message
    title_param_name: title
    data:
      priority: 7

---

Part 8: Message Markdown

Gotify supports Markdown in message bodies — rendered in the web UI and Android app:

curl -X POST "$BASE/message?token=$APP_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "title": "Deploy Report",
    "message": "## Deployment Successful\n\n**Version**: 2.3.1\n**Environment**: Production\n**Duration**: 45s\n\n```\nBuilt 3 services\nPushed to registry\nDeployed to prod\n```",
    "priority": 5,
    "extras": {
      "client::display": {
        "contentType": "text/markdown"
      }
    }
  }'

---

Maintenance

# Update:
docker compose pull
docker compose up -d

# Backup (SQLite):
docker cp gotify:/app/data/gotify.db \
  ./gotify-backup-$(date +%Y%m%d).db

# Or full data directory:
tar -czf gotify-data-$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.gz \
  $(docker volume inspect gotify_gotify_data --format '{{.Mountpoint}}')

# Check message counts by app:
docker exec gotify sqlite3 /app/data/gotify.db \
  "SELECT a.name, COUNT(m.id) as msgs FROM application a
   LEFT JOIN message m ON a.id = m.applicationid
   GROUP BY a.id ORDER BY msgs DESC;"

# Logs:
docker compose logs -f gotify

Why Self-Host Gotify?

The case for self-hosting Gotify comes down to three practical factors: data ownership, cost at scale, and operational control.

Data ownership is the fundamental argument. When you use a SaaS version of any tool, your data lives on someone else's infrastructure subject to their terms of service, their security practices, and their business continuity. If the vendor raises prices, gets acquired, changes API limits, or shuts down, you're left scrambling. Self-hosting Gotify means your data and configuration stay on infrastructure you control — whether that's a VPS, a bare metal server, or a home lab.

Cost at scale matters once you move beyond individual use. Most SaaS equivalents charge per user or per data volume. A self-hosted instance on a $10-20/month VPS typically costs less than per-user SaaS pricing for teams of five or more — and the cost doesn't scale linearly with usage. One well-configured server handles dozens of users for a flat monthly fee.

Operational control is the third factor. The Docker Compose configuration above exposes every setting that commercial equivalents often hide behind enterprise plans: custom networking, environment variables, storage backends, and authentication integrations. You decide when to update, how to configure backups, and what access controls to apply.

The honest tradeoff: you're responsible for updates, backups, and availability. For teams running any production workloads, this is familiar territory. For individuals, the learning curve is real but the tooling (Docker, Caddy, automated backups) is well-documented and widely supported.

Server Requirements and Sizing

Before deploying Gotify, assess your server capacity against expected workload.

Minimum viable setup: A 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM VPS with 20GB SSD is sufficient for personal use or small teams. Most consumer VPS providers — Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr — offer machines in this range for $5-10/month. Hetzner offers excellent price-to-performance for European and US regions.

Recommended production setup: 2 vCPUs with 4GB RAM and 40GB SSD handles most medium deployments without resource contention. This gives Gotify headroom for background tasks, caching, and concurrent users while leaving capacity for other services on the same host.

Storage planning: The Docker volumes in this docker-compose.yml store all persistent Gotify data. Estimate your storage growth rate early — for data-intensive tools, budget for 3-5x your initial estimate. Hetzner Cloud and Vultr both support online volume resizing without stopping your instance.

Operating system: Any modern 64-bit Linux distribution works. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and Debian 12 are the most commonly tested configurations. Ensure Docker Engine 24.0+ and Docker Compose v2 are installed — verify with docker --version and docker compose version. Avoid Docker Desktop on production Linux servers; it adds virtualization overhead and behaves differently from Docker Engine in ways that cause subtle networking issues.

Network: Only ports 80 and 443 need to be publicly accessible when running behind a reverse proxy. Internal service ports should be bound to localhost only. A minimal UFW firewall that blocks all inbound traffic except SSH, HTTP, and HTTPS is the single most effective security measure for a self-hosted server.

Backup and Disaster Recovery

Running Gotify without a tested backup strategy is an unacceptable availability risk. Docker volumes are not automatically backed up — if you delete a volume or the host fails, data is gone with no recovery path.

What to back up: The named Docker volumes containing Gotify's data (database files, user uploads, application state), your docker-compose.yml and any customized configuration files, and .env files containing secrets.

Backup approach: For simple setups, stop the container, archive the volume contents, then restart. For production environments where stopping causes disruption, use filesystem snapshots or database dump commands (PostgreSQL pg_dump, SQLite .backup, MySQL mysqldump) that produce consistent backups without downtime.

For a complete automated backup workflow that ships snapshots to S3-compatible object storage, see the Restic + Rclone backup guide. Restic handles deduplication and encryption; Rclone handles multi-destination uploads. The same setup works for any Docker volume.

Backup cadence: Daily backups to remote storage are a reasonable baseline for actively used tools. Use a 30-day retention window minimum — long enough to recover from mistakes discovered weeks later. For critical data, extend to 90 days and use a secondary destination.

Restore testing: A backup that has never been restored is a backup you cannot trust. Once a month, restore your Gotify backup to a separate Docker Compose stack on different ports and verify the data is intact. This catches silent backup failures, script errors, and volume permission issues before they matter in a real recovery.

Security Hardening

Self-hosting means you are responsible for Gotify's security posture. The Docker Compose setup provides a functional base; production deployments need additional hardening.

Always use a reverse proxy: Never expose Gotify's internal port directly to the internet. The docker-compose.yml binds to localhost; Caddy or Nginx provides HTTPS termination. Direct HTTP access transmits credentials in plaintext. A reverse proxy also centralizes TLS management, rate limiting, and access logging.

Strong credentials: Change default passwords immediately after first login. For secrets in docker-compose environment variables, generate random values with openssl rand -base64 32 rather than reusing existing passwords.

Firewall configuration:

ufw default deny incoming
ufw allow 22/tcp
ufw allow 80/tcp
ufw allow 443/tcp
ufw enable

Internal service ports (databases, admin panels, internal APIs) should only be reachable from localhost or the Docker network, never directly from the internet.

Network isolation: Docker Compose named networks keep Gotify's services isolated from other containers on the same host. Database containers should not share networks with containers that don't need direct database access.

VPN access for sensitive services: For internal-only tools, restricting access to a VPN adds a strong second layer. Headscale is an open source Tailscale control server that puts your self-hosted stack behind a WireGuard mesh, eliminating public internet exposure for internal tools.

Update discipline: Subscribe to Gotify's GitHub releases page to receive security advisory notifications. Schedule a monthly maintenance window to pull updated images. Running outdated container images is the most common cause of self-hosted service compromises.

Troubleshooting Common Issues

Container exits immediately or won't start

Check logs first — they almost always explain the failure:

docker compose logs -f gotify

Common causes: a missing required environment variable, a port already in use, or a volume permission error. Port conflicts appear as bind: address already in use. Find the conflicting process with ss -tlpn | grep PORT and either stop it or change Gotify's port mapping in docker-compose.yml.

Cannot reach the web interface

Work through this checklist:

1. Confirm the container is running: docker compose ps
2. Test locally on the server: curl -I http://localhost:PORT
3. If local access works but external doesn't, check your firewall: ufw status
4. If using a reverse proxy, verify it's running and the config is valid: caddy validate --config /etc/caddy/Caddyfile

Permission errors on volume mounts

Some containers run as a non-root user. If the Docker volume is owned by root, the container process cannot write to it. Find the volume's host path with docker volume inspect VOLUME_NAME, check the tool's documentation for its expected UID, and apply correct ownership:

chown -R 1000:1000 /var/lib/docker/volumes/your_volume/_data

High resource usage over time

Memory or CPU growing continuously usually indicates unconfigured log rotation, an unbound cache, or accumulated data needing pruning. Check current usage with docker stats gotify. Add resource limits in docker-compose.yml to prevent one container from starving others. For ongoing visibility into resource trends, deploy Prometheus + Grafana or Netdata.

Data disappears after container restart

Data stored in the container's writable layer — rather than a named volume — is lost when the container is removed or recreated. This happens when the volume mount path in docker-compose.yml doesn't match where the application writes data. Verify mount paths against the tool's documentation and correct the mapping. Named volumes persist across container removal; only docker compose down -v deletes them.

Keeping Gotify Updated

Gotify follows a regular release cadence. Staying current matters for security patches and compatibility. The update process with Docker Compose is straightforward:

docker compose pull          # Download updated images
docker compose up -d         # Restart with new images
docker image prune -f        # Remove old image layers (optional)

Read the changelog before major version updates. Some releases include database migrations or breaking configuration changes. For major version bumps, test in a staging environment first — run a copy of the service on different ports with the same volume data to validate the migration before touching production.

Version pinning: For stability, pin to a specific image tag in docker-compose.yml instead of latest. Update deliberately after reviewing the changelog. This trades automatic patch delivery for predictable behavior — the right call for business-critical services.

Post-update verification: After updating, confirm Gotify is functioning correctly. Most services expose a /health endpoint that returns HTTP 200 — curl it from the server or monitor it with your uptime tool.

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See also: ntfy — simpler pub/sub alternative with native iOS app and no account required

See all open source productivity tools at OSSAlt.com/categories/productivity.