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Walusimbi Silver ebde01ddeb Send cert alerts to ntfy over loopback

The script posted alerts to https://ntfy.silverwal.com/certbot, which is
served by the same nginx whose certificates it monitors. A TLS failure on
this host would make curl -fsS fail verification and drop the alert
describing that failure, leaving only a line in a log nobody reads.
ntfy is already bound to 127.0.0.1:2586, so post there instead.

2026-09-03 14:31:51 +03:00

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Silver Server Ops

Server-wide maintenance scripts and operational notes for the Silver Cloud Hetzner host.

This repo is for host-level improvements that are not tied to one specific app or service. SSL expiry alerts are the first check in the repo; more server-wide maintenance checks can be added here over time.

Implemented Checks

SSL certificate expiry alerts

SSL Certificate Expiry Alerts

scripts/check-cert-expiry.sh checks every Let's Encrypt certificate under /etc/letsencrypt/live and sends an ntfy alert when any certificate expires in less than 14 days.

Install

sudo install -m 0755 scripts/check-cert-expiry.sh /opt/scripts/check-cert-expiry.sh

Root cron

15 8 * * * /opt/scripts/check-cert-expiry.sh >>/var/log/cert-expiry-check.log 2>&1

Defaults

CERT_DIR=/etc/letsencrypt/live
EXPIRY_DAYS=14
NTFY_URL=http://127.0.0.1:2586/certbot
ALERT_ON_NO_CERTS=true

Overrides

EXPIRY_DAYS=21 /opt/scripts/check-cert-expiry.sh

If the ntfy topic is protected with an access token:

NTFY_TOKEN=your-token /opt/scripts/check-cert-expiry.sh

Manual test

sudo /opt/scripts/check-cert-expiry.sh

The script exits 0 when all certificates are healthy and 1 when it sends an alert or cannot run the check correctly.

Notification Notes

ntfy is a good default for this server because it is already self-hosted, simple to call from shell scripts, and supports useful alert metadata such as title, priority, and tags.

Alerts go to ntfy over http://127.0.0.1:2586 rather than the public https://ntfy.silverwal.com URL. The public URL is served by the same nginx whose certificates this script watches, so an expired or broken certificate on this host would fail curl's TLS verification and silently drop the very alert that reports it. The loopback address removes DNS, nginx, and TLS from the alerting path.

For jobs where silence is also a failure, pair ntfy with a dead man's switch such as Healthchecks. ntfy tells you what the script found; Healthchecks tells you when the script did not run at all.

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