Notifications

Notifications are sent by Coder in response to specific internal events, such as a workspace being deleted or a user being created.

Available events may differ between versions. For a list of all events, visit your Coder deployment's https://coder.example.com/deployment/notifications.

Event Types

Notifications are sent in response to internal events, to alert the affected user(s) of the event.

Coder supports the following list of events:

Template Events

These notifications are sent to users with template admin roles:

• Report: Workspace builds failed for template
  • This notification is delivered as part of a weekly cron job and summarizes the failed builds for a given template.
• Template deleted
• Template deprecated

User Events

These notifications are sent to users with owner and user admin roles:

• User account activated
• User account created
• User account deleted
• User account suspended

These account notifications cover both user and service accounts.

These notifications are sent to users themselves:

• User account suspended
• User account activated
• User password reset (One-time passcode)

Workspace Events

These notifications are sent to the workspace owner:

• Workspace automatic build failure
• Workspace autostop reminder
• Workspace created
• Workspace deleted
• Workspace manual build failure
• Workspace manually updated
• Workspace marked as dormant
• Workspace marked for deletion
• Out of memory (OOM) / Out of disk (OOD)
  • Template admins can configure OOM/OOD notifications in the template main.tf.
• Workspace automatically updated

Delivery Methods

Notifications can be delivered through the Coder dashboard Inbox and by SMTP or webhook. OOM/OOD notifications can be delivered to users in VS Code.

You can configure:

• SMTP or webhooks globally with CODER_NOTIFICATIONS_METHOD (default: smtp).
• Coder dashboard Inbox with CODER_NOTIFICATIONS_INBOX_ENABLED (default: true).

Premium customers can configure which method to use for each of the supported Events. See the Preferences section for more details.

Configuration

You can modify the notification delivery behavior in your Coder deployment's https://coder.example.com/settings/notifications, or with the following server flags:

Configure OOM/OOD notifications

You can monitor out of memory (OOM) and out of disk (OOD) errors and alert users when they overutilize memory and disk.

This can help prevent agent disconnects due to OOM/OOD issues.

To enable OOM/OOD notifications on a template, follow the steps in the resource monitoring guide.

SMTP (Email)

Use the smtp method to deliver notifications by email to your users. Coder does not ship with an SMTP server, so you will need to configure Coder to use an existing one.

Server Settings:

Authentication Settings:

TLS Settings:

NOTE: you MUST use CODER_EMAIL_FORCE_TLS if your smarthost supports TLS on a port other than 465.

Send emails using G-Suite

After setting the required fields above:

1. Create an App Password using the account you wish to send from.

2. Set the following configuration options:

   CODER_EMAIL_SMARTHOST=smtp.gmail.com:465 CODER_EMAIL_AUTH_USERNAME=<user>@<domain> CODER_EMAIL_AUTH_PASSWORD="<app password created above (no spaces)>"

   Note: The CODER_EMAIL_AUTH_PASSWORD must be entered without spaces.

See this help article from Google for more options.

Send emails using Outlook.com

After setting the required fields above:

1. Set up an account on Microsoft 365 or outlook.com

2. Set the following configuration options:

   CODER_EMAIL_SMARTHOST=smtp-mail.outlook.com:587 CODER_EMAIL_TLS_STARTTLS=true CODER_EMAIL_AUTH_USERNAME=<user>@<domain> CODER_EMAIL_AUTH_PASSWORD="<account password>"

See this help article from Microsoft for more options.

Webhook

The webhook delivery method sends an HTTP POST request to the defined endpoint. The purpose of webhook notifications is to enable integrations with other systems.

Settings:

Here is an example payload for Coder's webhook notification:

The top-level object has these keys:

• _version: describes the version of this schema; follows semantic versioning
• msg_id: the UUID of the notification (matches the ID in the notification_messages table)
• payload: contains the specific details of the notification; described below
• title: the title of the notification message (equivalent to a subject in SMTP delivery)
• body: the body of the notification message (equivalent to the message body in SMTP delivery)

The payload object has these keys:

• _version: describes the version of this inner schema; follows semantic versioning
• notification_name: name of the event which triggered the notification
• user_id: Coder internal user identifier of the target user (UUID)
• user_email: email address of the target user
• user_name: name of the target user
• user_username: username of the target user
• actions: a list of CTAs (Call-To-Action); these are mainly relevant for SMTP delivery in which they're shown as buttons
• labels: dynamic map of zero or more string key-value pairs; these vary from event to event

User Preferences

All users have the option to opt-out of any notifications. Go to Account -> Notifications to turn notifications on or off. The delivery method for each notification is indicated on the right hand side of this table.

Delivery Preferences

Administrators can configure which delivery methods are used for each different event type.

You can find this page under https://$CODER_ACCESS_URL/deployment/notifications?tab=events.

Custom notifications

Custom notifications let you send an ad‑hoc notification to yourself using the Coder CLI. These are useful for surfacing the result of long-running tasks or important state changes. At this time, custom notifications can only be sent to the user making the request.

To send a custom notification, execute coder notifications custom <title> <message>.

Note: The recipient is always the requesting user as targeting other users or groups isn’t supported yet.

Examples

• Send yourself a quick update:

• Use in a script after a long-running task:

Stop sending notifications

Administrators may wish to stop all notifications across the deployment. We support a killswitch in the CLI for these cases.

To pause sending notifications, execute coder notifications pause.

To resume sending notifications, execute coder notifications resume.

Troubleshooting

If notifications are not being delivered, use the following methods to troubleshoot:

1. Ensure notifications are being added to the notification_messages table.

2. Review any available error messages in the status_reason column

3. Review the logs. Search for the term notifications for diagnostic information.

   • If you do not see any relevant logs, set CODER_LOG_FILTER=".*notifications.*" to filter for notification-related logs.

4. If you are on version 2.15.x, notifications must be enabled using the notifications experiment.

   Notifications are enabled by default in Coder v2.16.0 and later.

Internals

The notification system is built to operate concurrently in a single- or multi-replica Coder deployment, and has a built-in retry mechanism. It uses the configured Postgres database to store notifications in a queue and facilitate concurrency.

All messages are stored in the notification_messages table.

Messages older than seven days are deleted.

Message States

A notifier here refers to a Coder replica which is responsible for dispatching the notification. All running replicas act as notifiers to process pending messages.

• a message begins in pending state
• transitions to leased when a Coder replica acquires new messages from the database
  • new messages are checked for every CODER_NOTIFICATIONS_FETCH_INTERVAL (default: 15s)
• if a message is delivered successfully, it transitions to sent state
• if a message encounters a non-retryable error (for example, misconfiguration), it transitions to permanent_failure
• if a message encounters a retryable error (for example, temporary server outage), it transitions to temporary_failure
  • this message will be retried up to CODER_NOTIFICATIONS_MAX_SEND_ATTEMPTS (default: 5)
  • this message will transition back to pending state after CODER_NOTIFICATIONS_RETRY_INTERVAL (default: 5m) and be retried
  • after CODER_NOTIFICATIONS_MAX_SEND_ATTEMPTS is exceeded, it transitions to permanent_failure

See Troubleshooting above for more details.