SMFNotify

Announce new threads and posts in a Simple Machines Forum instance by sending HTTP requests to a configurable webhook endpoint.

Usage

SMFNotify is intended to be invoked regularly, for example every few minutes (depending on the activity of the monitored forum and how quickly people want to be informed about new posts).

Each invocation fetches the feed, looks for new entries, and calls the webhook for each one before exiting.

A configuration file is mandatory to run it:

$ smfnotify --config config_example.toml

An example configuration file is included as config_example.toml and looks like this:

feed_url = "https://forum.example.com/index.php?action=.xml;type=atom"
feed_cookie_value = "<insert value of your 'SMFCookie10' cookie>"
feed_max_new_entries = 5

last_processed_id_filename = "last_processed_id"

webhook_text_template = "{author} posted to forum: \"{title}\" - <{url}>"
webhook_url = "http://127.0.0.1:8080/<your-webhook-path>"

interval_in_seconds = 120

To obtain the cookie value, log in to the forum, then use your web browser's debugger or an extension to look up the cookie named SMFCookie10.

The interval is optional. If it is not set, SMFNotify will only fetch and potentially notify about new entries just once, then exit.

Docker

Both a Dockerfile and a compose.yaml are included to support running SMFNotify with Docker and Docker Compose.

Be sure to provide:

• a configuration file named config.toml (and configure an interval) and
• a last_processed_id file (can be empty; create with touch last_processed_id)

to avoid issues.

Background

SMFNotify is a port of a Python script I wrote in October 2015.

License

SMFNotify is licensed under the MIT license.

Copyright

Copyright 2022-2023 Jochen Kupperschmidt