About

The problem

While I was working on a different project, I needed to enable its users to send notifications. Soon I discovered that this was a project by itself, discovering and implementing different provider API, testing it, relying on outdated documentation at times and etc. It was quite the endeavour. Some providers offered their own SDK packages, but that meant adding more dependencies to an already dependency rich project, which was not ideal. There has to be a better way, right?

The solution

Enter notifiers. A common interface to many, many notification providers, with a minimal set of dependencies.

The interface

Consistent naming

Right out of the gate there was an issue of consistent naming. Different API providers have different names for similar properties. For example, one provider can name its API key as api_key, another as token, the third as apikey and etc. The solution I chose was to be as fateful to the original API properties as possible, with the only exception being the message property, which is shared among all notifiers and replaced internally as needed.

Snake Case

While the majority of providers already expect lower case and speicfically snake cased properties in their request, some do not. Notifiers normalizes this by making all request properties snake case and converting to relevant usage behind the scenes.

Reserved words issue

Some provider properties clash with python’s reserved words, from being the most prominent example of that. There are two solutions to that issues. The first is to construct data via a dict and unpack it into the notify() command like so:

>>> data = {
...  'to': 'foo@bar.com',
...  'from': 'bar@foo.com'
... }
>>> provider.notify(**data)

The other is to use an alternate key word, which would always be the reserved key word followed by an underscore:

>>> provider.notify(to='foo@bar.com', from_='bar@foo.com')

What this is

A general wrapper for a variety of 3rd party providers and built in ones (like SMTP) aimed solely at sending notifications.

Who is this for

Developers aiming to integrate 3rd party notifications into their application
Script makes aiming to enable 3rd party notification abilities, either via python script or any CLI script
Anyone that want to programmatically send notification and not be concerned about familiarizing themselves with 3rd party APIs or built in abilities

What this isn’t

Many providers API enable many other capabilities other than sending notification. None of those will be handled by this module as it’s outside its scope. If you need API access other than sending notification, look into implementing the 3rd party API directly, or using an SDK if available.