Israel Homefront Notifier

A cross-platform alert monitor for Israel's Home Front Command (Pikud HaOref). Polls the official API and delivers native notifications for rocket alerts, safe-room updates, and other warnings in your configured cities.

Supports macOS and Linux.

Linux users: See README-linux.md for Linux-specific installation and usage.

Features

• Native notifications with sound
• Configurable city list (supports Hebrew names)
• Runs as a background service
• Lightweight -- pure Python, no external dependencies required (optional certifi for SSL)
• First-run seeding to avoid duplicate notifications on startup

Quick start

git clone https://github.com/amito/israel-homefront-macos-notifier.git
cd israel-homefront-macos-notifier

# Edit the city list
vi config.json

# Install as a service (starts automatically)
./install.sh

See INSTALL.md for detailed instructions.

Configuration

Edit config.json:

{
  "cities": ["תל אביב - יפו", "חיפה"],
  "poll_interval_seconds": 5,
  "lang": "he"
}

Field	Description	Default
cities	List of city names in Hebrew	required
poll_interval_seconds	Seconds between API polls	5
lang	API language code	"he"

How it works

1. Polls the Pikud HaOref alerts history API every few seconds
2. Tracks seen alerts in ~/.oref-notifier/seen_alerts.json
3. Sends a native notification for each new alert
4. On first run, seeds all existing alerts as "seen" to avoid a notification flood

License

MIT