text-me-when

text-me-when sends you SMS reminder messages at times you specify in a cron-like format. It uses AWS SNS to send SMS messages. It is independent of of any phone, email or calendar ecosystems, and thus protects your privacy.

Building and Installation

To build text-me-when, you need the Go compiler. Once you have that, clone this repository and do:

go build text-me-when.go

You can then copy text-me-when to an appropriate location.

Configuration

Reminders

Reminders are configured via a JSON file that contains an array of Reminder objects. Each Reminder has a message that is sent when it is triggered, and a list of triggers. Each trigger specifies times when the message is sent out. Each trigger uses a cron-like format, and supports the formats "", "/3", "1,2,3", and "2". These formats should be familiar to anyone who has used cron; those who are not familiar with cron should read its documentation to understand how to configure text-me-when.

The following is an example config:

[
  {
    "version": "v1",
    "message": "This message is printed on the first day of January and August at 09:00.",
    "triggers": [
      {
        "trigger_type": "cron",
        "minute": "0",
        "hour": "9",
        "day_of_month": "1",
        "month": "1,8",
        "day_of_week": "*"
      }
    ]
  },
  {
    "version": "v1",
    "message": "This message is printed every other minute on the third day of every month.",
    "triggers": [
      {
        "trigger_type": "cron",
        "minute": "*/2",
        "hour": "*",
        "day_of_month": "3",
        "month": "*",
        "day_of_week": "*"
      }
    ]
  }
]

The default location for this file is /etc/text-me-when.json. You can change this with the -c flag.

General Config

Other than reminders, there are four pieces of information you need to pass to text-me-when. These are more or less explained in the usage:

Usage: text-me-when [OPTIONS] PHONE_NUMBER

  Checks once a minute for reminders whose messages should be sent out.
  PHONE_NUMBER is the phone number, in E.164 format, that you want the messages
  to be sent to.

  The environment variables AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, and
  AWS_DEFAULT_REGION are required to send text messages via AWS SNS. For more
  information on what these mean please see the AWS documentation.

Options:
  -c string
        The path to the reminders config (default "/etc/text-me-when.json")
  -t    Send a test SMS to the configured phone number before entering main loop