IFTTT Webhook Notifications

IFTTT offers free-no-strings-attached webhooks for use in personal projects. I’ve been experimenting with these on my latest Raspberry Pi project to send notifications to my phone. The project is an always-active webcam pointed at a scenic vista that posts to Instagram and streams to Youtube. When a job finishes, or error occurs I get immediately notified - pretty cool!

Get Started

Signup on the website https://ifttt.com and download the app for iOS or Android. Under “My Applets” select “New Applet”. Setup the applet so IF webhook is triggered THEN notification is sent. When creating the applet choose a unique {event} name, you will need that later.

You can choose between regular notification or rich notification. A regular notification sends text only. A rich notification can send text with links and photos. Create a simple message that includesingredients from the dropdown menu. value1 value2 value3 are optional fields sent in the body of webhook request. These can be used to customize the notification message.

Next go to https://ifttt.com/services/maker_webhooks/settings and write down your webhook {key} - anyone with this key can trigger this webhook.

…That’s it! Here are some examples to help you get started.

Examples

To trigger the webhook - you just need to send an http request. I’ve included examples for curl and python but http requests can be sent by many languages.

GET

The quickest way to trigger your webhook is an http GET request. Seriously, navigate to https://maker.ifttt.com/trigger/{event}/with/key/{key} in a web-browser. You will recieved a plain html page with the text Congratulations! You've fired the {event} event and a mobile notification.

Shell

curl https://maker.ifttt.com/trigger/{event}/with/key/{key}

Python

import requests
requests.get(https://maker.ifttt.com/trigger/{event}/with/key/{key})

POST

To give your notifications panache - use an http POST request. You can include data in the request body as JSON with keys value1 value2 value3 that map to message ingredients. For example {"value1":"success} would subsitute value1 with “success” in the message template.

Shell

curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{data}' \
https://maker.ifttt.com/trigger/{event}/with/key/{key}

curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"value1":"Artwork by Picasso", "value2":"https://bit.ly/1KMoKoN"}' \
https://maker.ifttt.com/trigger/{event}/with/key/{key}

Python

import requests
address = 'https://maker.ifttt.com/trigger/{event}/with/key/{key}'
requests.post(address, data = {data})

import requests
address = 'https://maker.ifttt.com/trigger/{event}/with/key/{key}'
requests.post(address, data = {"value1":"Artwork by Picasso", "value2":"https://bit.ly/1KMoKoN"})