I’m currently working on a small project: a web service written in Flask.

The service is currently at an early stage, and still so small that I want to be notified of every exception that happens in production.

I can easily get these as mails¹ – which I am – but during peak hours I want to be able to respond immediatly to an error, and not have it drown in the rest of whatever mail I’m getting in.

So I thought, why not receive a push notification?

I was sure I had heard of at least one app made with just that in mind – receiving custom push notifications that can be created automatically via an API. (I don’t want to create my own iOS app just for that with provisioning and all that cruft and timesuck)

Sure enough: Pushover and Boxcar fit the bill. I ended up going with Pushover for now as Boxcar requires iOS 8 which I’m not on yet.

I’m already sending the exceptions as mail to my Gmail, with a “plus-alias”: my-email+flask-exceptions@gmail.com² so the Pushover email API³ was perfect for quickly getting up and running.

I set up a filter in Gmail, forwarding those mails (filtered on the To: field) to API-KEY@api.pushover.net – and now I’m receiving exceptions from Flask as push notifications on my phone. Pretty neat!

¹ https://flask.pocoo.org/docs/0.10/errorhandling/#error-mails
² https://support.google.com/mail/answer/12096?hl=en
³ https://updates.pushover.net/post/24408806716/e-mail-to-pushover-gateway