A command line tool to send push notifications using the Apple Push Notification Service.

This command sends a user visible push notification to the device, with the given title and body:

apns send alert \
    -k private-key.p8 \
    --key-id ABCD123456 \
    --team-id ABCD123456 \
    -t com.example.app \
    -d <device-identifier> \
    --title "Hello world!" \
    --body "How are you?" \
    --sound

By default, it uses the sandbox APNS server. Add the -p flag to switch to production.

You can add a custom JSON payload to your notification:

apns send alert \
    -k private-key.p8 \
    --key-id ABCD123456 \
    --team-id ABCD123456 \
    -t com.example.app \
    -d <device-identifier> \
    --title "Hello world!" \
    --body "How are you?" \
    --sound \
    '{"hello":42}'

For more information:

apns send alert --help

This command sends a background push notification to the device, with the given custom payload:

apns send background \
    -k private-key.p8 \
    --key-id ABCD123456 \
    --team-id ABCD123456 \
    -t com.example.app \
    -d <device-identifier> \
    '{"hello":42}'

For more information:

apns send background --help

The easiest way is to download a precompiled executable from the Releases page. The installer package is signed and notarised by Apple, it just installs the apns executable into /usr/local/bin.

Alternatively, you can build the project yourself (see below).

To uninstall, just remove /usr/local/bin/apns.

• Xcode 15+ with Swift 5.9

Build the executable using:

swift build -c release

Then move the .build/release/apns executable to one of your $PATH directory, for example:

sudo cp .build/release/apns /usr/local/bin

For distribution, build the universal fat-executable using:

swift build -c release --arch arm64 --arch x86_64

This allows the executable to run on both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs.