How do I send a notification to my phone from a bash script?
curl your Lert link. One line with a title and body and your phone buzzes — even locked in your pocket. No account, no API keys, no SDK. If you have curl, you're done.
Shell scripts are the glue of every server — backups, deploys, cron jobs, cleanup tasks — and they usually run where nobody's watching. Lert lets a script shout when it finishes or fails, straight to your lock screen, using the one tool that's already on every machine: curl. Because your Lert link is the credential, there's no key to export and nothing to install.
Set it up in under 30 seconds
- Download the app. Open it once — there's no account to create. Your private link is on screen.
- Copy your link. One tap copies
https://lert.dev/p/your-id. - Add a curl to your script. Drop it wherever you want the buzz.
Run the script and your phone buzzes.
Example: one line of curl
curl -X POST "https://lert.dev/p/your-id" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d '{"title":"Backup done ✅","body":"db dumped to S3","tag":"cron"}'
No auth token, no SDK — just curl. Put it at the end of a backup, after a deploy, or in a trap that fires on error. You can also send plain text as the body if you'd rather skip the JSON.
Tip: capture your command's exit code and branch on it — send a "✅ done" on $? -eq 0 and a "❌ failed" otherwise. Now one script tells you both which job ran and how it went, without you opening a terminal.
Related setups
- Get notified when a GitHub Actions workflow finishes
- Get notified when a database value changes
- Send a notification from Python
- Send a push notification in one line
See the full curl guide and the database alert notifications use case. It's free for one channel and 50 notifications a day; Lert Pro is $2.99/month for unlimited. Full details in the docs.
One curl, straight to your phone.
Download Lert, copy your link, add one curl. Your phone buzzes when the script's done.