content: add weechat ntfy.sh blog post

Author: Tiim

Diff for: content/blog/2023-03-28-weechat-notification-ntfy.md

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+---
+uuid: "ef51e944-86fa-44b0-ab9d-be7f8d8e569a"
+date: 2023-03-28T10:05:19Z
+created: 2023-01-15T20:35:40.643Z
+aliases:
+  -
+title: Weechat Notifications with ntfy.sh
+published: true
+modified:
+description: "Using the weechat trigger plugin to notify yourself about new private messages and mentions through the ntfy.sh notification service."
+cover_image: "https://media.tiim.ch/97833b1d-d602-4d9a-9689-3077e96e45ba.webp"
+cover_image_txt: "stable diffusion - Anything V3.0 - boy using an old DOS computer, 90s vibes, muted pastel colors, stylized, thick lines, IRC, console"
+content_tags: ["weechat", "ntfy.sh", "wget", "irc"]
+---
+
+In one of my last blog posts I [set up WeeChat in docker](https://tiim.ch/blog/2023-01-15-weechat-docker), which works mostly pretty great for me so far. Although, it started to bug me that I felt the need to regularly check IRC in case I missed someone potentially tagging or private-messaging me. While looking around at how I could be notified on mentions and private messages, I found the [trigger plugin](https://weechat.org/files/doc/stable/weechat_user.en.html#trigger). A powerful plugin that comes pre-installed on WeeChat. It lets the user specify a WeeChat command that will be executed when a specific event occurs. This plugin is probably powerful enough to build a small IRC bot, directly in WeeChat.
+
+Also, I recently found the web service [ntfy.sh](https://ntfy.sh). It sends push notifications whenever you send an HTTP post request to a certain URL. I already have ntfy.sh installed on my android phone, and I also found a minimal and lightweight [desktop client](https://github.com/lucas-bortoli/ntfysh-windows).
+
+I managed to set a WeeChat trigger up that fires every time I get mentioned (highlighted in WeeChat terminology), and a trigger that fires every time I get a private message. Both of those triggers execute the `/exec` command which runs an arbitrary shell command. The exec command runs the `wget` program to send a post request to the ntfy.sh server, which in turn sends a notification to all apps that subscribe to the same URL as the post request was sent. I would usually use the curl program for this instead of wget, but the docker default docker image doesn't contain a curl install.
+
+Here you can see the two `/trigger` commands:
+
+_trigger on mention_
+
+```
+/trigger addreplace notify_highlight print '' '${tg_highlight}' '/.*/${weechat.look.nick_prefix}${tg_prefix_nocolor}${weechat.look.nick_suffix} ${tg_message_nocolor}/' '/exec -norc -nosw -bg wget -O- --post-data "${tg_message}" "-                   -header=Title: New highlight: ${buffer.full_name}" https://ntfy.sh/my_ntfy_topic_1234'
+```
+
+_trigger on private message_
+
+```weechat
+/trigger addreplace notify_privmsg print '' '${tg_tag_notify} == private && ${buffer.notify} > 0' '/.*/${weechat.look.nick_prefix}${tg_prefix_nocolor}${weechat.look.nick_suffix} ${tg_message_nocolor}/' '/exec -norc -nosw -bg wget -O- --post-data "${tg_message}" "--header=Title: New private message: ${buffer.full_name}" https://ntfy.sh/my_ntfy_topic_1234'
+```
+
+## The trigger commands in detail
+
+In case you don't just want to copy and paste some random command from the internet into your WeeChat (which you shouldn't do anyway), I will try to explain the trigger command that fires when you get mentioned in a message:
+
+Let's first look at the trigger command itself:
+`/trigger addreplace <name> <hook> <argument> <condition> <variable-replace> <command>`
+We call the `/trigger` command with the `addreplace` subcommand. This subcommand will either register a new trigger or replace it if one with the same name already exists.
+
+- `name` - This argument is self-explanatory, the name of the trigger. In our case I called it `notify_highlight`, but you could call it whatever you want.
+- `hook` - This argument specifies which hook or event the trigger should listen for. WeeChat is built as an event-driven platform, so pretty much anything from mouse movements to IRC messages are handled via events. In this case, we want to trigger on the `print` event, which is fired every time a new message gets received from IRC.
+- `argument` - The argument is needed for some hooks, but not for the `print` hook, so we are going to ignore that one for now and just set it to an empty string `''`.
+- `condition` - The condition must evaluate to `true` for the trigger to fire. This is helpful because the `print` trigger fires for every new message, but we only want to be notified when the new message mentions our nick. The condition for this is `${tg_highlight}`. You can find the list of variables that you can access with the command `/trigger monitor`, which prints all variables for every trigger that gets executed.
+- `variable-replace` - This took me a while to understand. This command is used to manipulate data and save it to a variable. The syntax is inspired by the sed command. Explaining it fully is out of the scope of this blog post, but you can take a look at the [docs](https://weechat.org/files/doc/devel/weechat_user.en.html#trigger_regex). In our example, we replace the whole content of the variable `tg_message` with the format string `${weechat.look.nick_prefix}${tg_prefix_nocolor}${weechat.look.nick_suffix} ${tg_message_nocolor}` which results in a sting like `<tiim> Hello world!`.
+- `command` - The last argument is the command that gets executed whenever this trigger fires. In our case, we use the `/execute` command, which starts the wget command which in turn sends a post request to ntfy.sh. Make sure you set the ntfy topic (the part after `https://ntfy.sh/`) to something private and long enough so that nobody else is going to guess it by accident.
+
+Don't forget to subscribe to the ntfy topic on your phone or whatever device you want to receive the notification on.
+
+The possibilities with the trigger plugin are endless, I hope this inspires you to build your own customizations using weechat.
+
+%%
+
+## Checklist
+
+- [x] Finish writing text
+- [x] Thumbnail Created
+  - [x] Resized to 1024x512
+  - [x] Uploaded using uplog
+  - [x] Prompt text or description added
+- [ ] Date set to timestamp
+- [x] Reviewed using grammarly
+- [x] Transferred to website/content folder
+- [x] Removed heading
+- [ ] Reread on dev site
+
+## 📎 Related
+
+- [[Blog Posts]]
+- [[WeeChat (Software)]]
+- [[ntfy.sh (Service)]]
+
+## 📇 Additional Metadata
+
+- 🗂 Type:: #type/content/blog-post
+- 📝 Status:: #status/ready
+- 🔐 Visibility::
+- 👥 Team::
+- 🗨 Language: #lang/en
+
+**Personal**
+
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