Gravity Forms ntfy Premium Add-on Setup Guide

The Gravity Forms ntfy Premium Add-on sends a push notification to an ntfy topic every time one of your forms is submitted. The notification’s title, message, priority, tags and click link are all built from the entry with merge tags, so a new booking, order or support request lands on your phone or desktop within seconds — no email, no refreshing an inbox. It works with your own self-hosted ntfy server or with the free ntfy.sh.

Everything happens in the background. The visitor’s submission is never held up waiting for the ntfy server, and a slow or unreachable server never blocks a form. A failed send is retried on a safe schedule, each result is written to the entry as a note, and your access token — if your server needs one — is encrypted before it is stored and is only ever sent to the server you configured.

What you need

• WordPress with Gravity Forms 2.5 or newer.
• PHP 7.4 or newer.
• An active license key for this add-on.
• An ntfy server — either the free ntfy.sh or your own self-hosted server — and a topic to publish to.

If Gravity Forms is missing or older than 2.5, the add-on shows a notice in the WordPress admin and does nothing else, so a form is never left half configured.

A one-minute primer on ntfy

ntfy (pronounced “notify”) is a small, open-source push-notification service. You pick a topic — just a name, like northwind-bookings — and subscribe to it in the free ntfy app on your phone, or in any web browser. Anything published to that topic is pushed to every subscriber as a notification. On the public server ntfy.sh a topic needs no account at all; a topic is simply a shared name, so choose one that is hard to guess. If you want private topics, user accounts or full control of your data, you can run your own ntfy server and point the add-on at it.

This add-on is the publisher. When a form is submitted, it sends one notification to the topic you choose, with the content you template from the form. Your subscribers receive it wherever they are signed in.

The settings page

Install and activate the add-on like any plugin, after Gravity Forms. Then open Forms → Settings → ntfy. This one page holds your license key and the connection to your ntfy server.

Server URL

Enter the address of your ntfy server. For the public service this is simply https://ntfy.sh, which is filled in for you. For a self-hosted server, use its full address, for example https://ntfy.your-company.com. Only an http or https address is accepted, and the notification is sent to this server and nowhere else. If you ever move servers, change this one field and every feed follows.

Default topic

Set the topic a feed publishes to unless it chooses its own. A topic is letters, digits, underscores and dashes, up to sixty-four characters. Pick something specific and hard to guess, because on a public server anyone who knows the topic name can subscribe to it. Subscribe to the same topic in the ntfy app to receive what your forms send.

Access token

Public topics on ntfy.sh need no token, so you can leave this empty. If your server is protected, or you publish to a reserved topic on ntfy.sh, create an access token in your ntfy account and paste it here. The token is encrypted at rest before it is stored, so the plain value never sits in your database. After it is saved the field is shown empty and the page confirms a token is stored; type a new one at any time to replace it, or tick the remove box to clear it. The token is sent only to your ntfy server, as a bearer token, and is never written to an entry note or a log.

The connection test

Next to the fields is a Check the connection button. Press it and the add-on asks your server for its health status with the saved token. A clear “Connected” message means the server answers and looks like an ntfy server; a plain message tells you if the address is wrong or the server cannot be reached. The test sends no notification, so you can run it as often as you like. Save the page first whenever you change the server or token.

Add an ntfy feed to a form

Notifications are set up per form, as feeds. Open a form, go to Settings → ntfy and add a feed. A form can have several feeds, each with its own condition and its own topic, so one submission can notify more than one topic or audience.

Topic

Leave this empty to use the default topic from the settings, or set a topic just for this feed. A merge tag works here too, so a form could even route to a topic chosen by the visitor if you wanted, though a fixed topic is the usual choice.

Title and message

The message is the body of the notification and is required; the title is the bold line above it and is optional. Write them as templates and drop in merge tags for the answers you care about, for example a title of New booking: {Name:1} and a message of {Name:1} booked the {Plan:2} plan. Notes: {Notes:4}. Merge tags are replaced with the visitor’s answers as plain text when the form is submitted. A message longer than 4,096 characters is trimmed.

Priority

Priority decides how the notification behaves on the device. Max pops up and buzzes for something urgent; high is a strong nudge; default is a normal notification; low and min arrive quietly without a sound. Choose the level that fits how important the form is. A lead form might be high; a routine survey might be low.

Tags

Tags are short labels, separated by commas. A tag that matches an emoji short code — such as warning, tada or white_check_mark — shows as that emoji in the notification, which is a handy way to make an alert stand out; other tags show as small text labels. Up to twenty tags are sent, and anything that is not a simple word is left out.

Click URL

Set a web address that opens when the notification is tapped. A merge tag works here, so you can link straight to the related record, for example https://your-site.example/wp-admin/admin.php?page=gf_entries&view=entry&lid={entry_id}. It must be a full http or https address; anything else is left out and noted on the entry.

Condition

Use the condition to send the notification only for the entries that matter. You might only notify when a plan is Premium, when a total is above a threshold, or when a checkbox is ticked. An entry that does not match simply does not trigger this feed.

What happens on submit

When a matching form is submitted, the add-on builds the notification and hands it to a background job, so the visitor sees the confirmation at once and never waits for the server. The job publishes the message to <server>/<topic> with the title, priority, tags and click URL as ntfy headers, and the access token as a bearer token when one is set. The ntfy server accepts it and returns a message id, which the add-on records.

If the server cannot be reached because of a network problem that happened before the request arrived, the send is retried automatically after one minute, then five, then longer, up to a few attempts. If a reply never arrives, or the server returns a server error, the add-on treats the result as uncertain and does not retry, so you are never sent the same notification twice. A refusal such as a wrong token is final and is reported, not retried.

Entry notes, merge tags and events

Every send is written to the entry as a note — a success note with the topic and ntfy id, or an error note that explains what went wrong (with your token masked). The entry also gets an ntfy box that shows the status at a glance. Two merge tags, {ntfy_status} and {ntfy_message_id}, let you drop the result into a confirmation or another notification.

The add-on also adds two Gravity Forms notification events: “the notification was sent” and “the notification could not be sent”. You can use the second to email yourself whenever a send fails, so a quiet ntfy outage never goes unnoticed. Developers can also use the gform_ntfy_notification filter to adjust the title, message, priority, tags or click URL in code before the notification leaves.

Privacy and safety

The only outside service the add-on contacts is the ntfy server you configure. The title, message, tags and click URL built from the form are sent there to deliver the notification, and the ntfy server processes that data under its own terms. Your access token is encrypted at rest, is never shown again after you save it, and is never written to an entry note or a log. Nothing is sent to any other host.

Troubleshooting

The notification never arrives. Make sure you are subscribed to the exact same topic in the ntfy app as the one on the feed or in the settings, and that the topic is spelled the same way. Run the connection test to confirm the server answers.

The entry note says the server refused the request. On a protected server or a reserved topic, check that the access token is set and is allowed to publish to that topic. On ntfy.sh, a token is only needed for reserved topics.

The message is empty. The message is built from merge tags; if every tag resolves to nothing the send is skipped and the entry is noted. Make sure the fields you reference have values.

With the server URL and a topic set, a subscription in the ntfy app and a feed on your form, a Gravity Forms submission becomes an instant push notification — delivered in the background, recorded on the entry, and sent to no one but the server you chose.