Easy notifications from R

R can be a pretty slow tool. So it would be good to know when an expensive computation has ended. One way to do that is to have R send a notification to your phone when it is done. Here, I’ll show how to do that easily with ntfy.

Download ntfy.sh

Go to your app store (iOS/Android) and download the ntfy app.

Subscribe to a topic

Open the app on your phone and subscribe to a topic. Just type in a name that’s both memorable and not likely to already be used by someone else. I use vuorre-r-notifications.

Send notifications

You can now include variations of system("curl -d 'Notification text' ntfy.sh/vuorre-r-notifications") in your R code. For example, to send a notification after a long running code

# Long running code here
Sys.sleep(.1)  # Sleep for .1 second
# Send notification
system("curl -d 'Woke up after .1 second nap!' ntfy.sh/vuorre-r-notifications")

You’ll get this notification on your phone:

This is really useful when you have simulations (mcmc or otherwise 😉) that take a long time, and you’d like to act as soon as they are done. Have fun!