Boop: a self-hosted push notification inbox you can run on a VPS

Anyone who manages cron jobs, overnight backups or deploy pipelines knows the problem: needing to know straight away if something has gone wrong, without opening a dashboard or paying for a seat-based error tracking service. Boop, an open source project written in Go, tries to solve this with a server that installs on your own VPS and forwards application events as native push notifications to an iPhone.

What it does and how it's built

The workflow is simple: apps send events to the Go server via POST, which stores them in SQLite and pushes them to APNs; the iOS app retrieves the full details from the server, and the web UI manages projects and displays the pairing QR code. There is no third-party relay between the server and Apple. According to the project's author, the server uses around 8 MB of memory on his machine. The project is deliberately not an observability platform nor a Sentry replacement: it receives events from applications, sends native push notifications and keeps them in a dedicated mobile inbox.

The key thing to know before getting started concerns the iPhone app: the iOS app is written in SwiftUI, targeting iOS 26, and must be built and signed by the user, so you'll need an Apple Developer account and a Mac with Xcode. On the client library side, there are Elixir and Node clients available, as well as a community package for Laravel.

Minimal installation

The Docker quick start published in the official repository is:

git clone https://github.com/chrisgreg/boop && cd boop
cp .env.example .env
mkdir -p data && chown 1000:1000 data
docker compose up -d --build
open http://localhost:8080

The first login opens a setup wizard: server verification, APNs, pairing, first project, test notification. APNs credentials are optional: without them, events are still saved and shown in the UI, but push notifications are skipped, and the settings page flags this. For those who'd rather avoid Docker, a static binary is available: every release ships a dependency-free static binary for Linux, macOS and Windows (amd64 and arm64) with the web UI embedded.

Where to run it

The workload is minimal: a Go process writing to an SQLite file, plus occasional TLS connections to Apple. For a project of this size, a cheap VPS with a stable public hostname and HTTPS in front is enough — this requirement is more critical than raw compute power, since the phone needs to reach the server every time a notification is opened. On Contabo's official price list, checked on 8 October 2026, the Cloud VPS 4 plan (4 vCPUs, 8 GB RAM, 100 GB SSD, unlimited traffic) is offered at €5.50 a month including VAT for the first 24 months; the page also lists higher-tier plans, from Cloud VPS 6 up to Cloud VPS 18, with RAM scaling up to 96 GB.

For anyone wanting to avoid surprises, two operational tips drawn from the project's documentation: set BOOP_ADMIN_USER and BOOP_ADMIN_PASSWORD before exposing the server to the internet, since without these variables the admin endpoints remain open; and back up the database with sqlite3 data/boop.db ".backup backup.db" rather than taking a cold copy of the file.