Nobody wants to hear “hey, your site’s down” from a client or teammate.

It’s way better to catch issues before anyone notices — and that’s exactly what Gatus helps you do.

It’s a self-hosted tool that keeps an eye on your endpoints and tells you when something goes sideways.

But just monitoring isn’t enough — you need to know the moment things break.

That’s where ntfy comes in.

It’s a dead-simple notification service that can ping your phone, browser, or terminal in real time.

In this guide, you’ll:

• Set up Gatus to check if your service is up
• Plug in ntfy so you get alerts instantly
• Lock it down with basic authentication so it’s not wide open to the world

It’s fast to set up, easy to maintain, and doesn’t need any cloud accounts or fancy dashboards. Just you, some YAML, and peace of mind.

Why Gatus?

Gatus lets you define endpoints in a YAML file and check their health regularly:

• Is the endpoint returning 200 OK?
• Is it responding within 150ms?
• If not, trigger an alert via ntfy, Slack, or others.

No cloud account, no vendor lock-in.

docker run -p 8080:8080 --name gatus twinproduction/gatus:stable

docker run -p 8080:8080 --name gatus ghcr.io/twin/gatus:stable

Why ntfy?

ntfy lets you receive alerts anywhere using:

• A mobile app
• Your terminal
• Browser tabs
• Even custom scripts

It’s easy to self-host, and it works with a simple curl or POST request.

1. Gatus Config with ntfy

Here’s a working config.yaml for Gatus:

ntfy:
  url: "https://ntfy.dev.to"
  topic: "gatus"
  priority: 5
  token: "tk_gjblah"
  default-alert:
    failure-threshold: 3
    send-on-resolved: false
    interval: 1m
  overrides:
    - group: "critical"
      priority: 5

security:
  basic:
    username: "username"
    password-bcrypt-base64: "pwd"  # bcrypt hash (base64 encoded)

endpoints:
  - name: purchases
    group: hex-core
    url: "https://dev.to/health"
    interval: 2m
    conditions:
      - "[STATUS] == 200"
      - "[RESPONSE_TIME] < 150"
    alerts:
      - type: ntfy
        description: dev.to is down

What this does:

• Every 2 minutes, Gatus checks https://dev.to/health.
• If it fails 3 times in a row, it triggers an ntfy alert.
• It will not send a "resolved" notification once the site comes back (you can toggle this).
• Uses basic auth for the dashboard.

2. Self-host ntfy

You can self-host ntfy with a server.yaml like this:

base-url: "https://ntfy.dev.to"
auth-file: "/data/auth.db"
auth-default-access: "deny-all"
behind-proxy: true

Then build and run:

docker run -d -p 8080:80 --name ntfy my-ntfy

Add users:

docker exec -it ntfy ntfy user add --role=dev
docker exec -it ntfy ntfy user list

This gives you full control over access, topics, and permissions.

3. Quick Reset Script for Gatus

Here’s a quick way to stop and reset your Gatus container:

#!/bin/bash
docker stop gatus-container
docker rm gatus-container

Run it before redeploying if needed.

Wrap-up

With this setup:

• Gatus checks your endpoints and sends HTTP alerts.
• ntfy delivers them instantly — no third-party services.
• Both are lightweight, open-source, and customizable.

Perfect for small teams or internal infra monitoring.

I’ve been actively working on a super-convenient tool called LiveAPI.

LiveAPI helps you get all your backend APIs documented in a few minutes

With LiveAPI, you can quickly generate interactive API documentation that allows users to execute APIs directly from the browser.

If you’re tired of manually creating docs for your APIs, this tool might just make your life easier.