I thought I’d try something simple, wanting to send a notification post request to a device with a JSON in the body. As it turns out, this seems much harder than it probably should, and all the help I could find ended up in people doing it ultimately in a different way (e.g. via Curl). I am not yet at the point to give up, but all the reasonable combinations just don’t work. I just need to send a simple body ‘{reload: true}’ to the URL of my wall panel device, and using Postmaster just works like a charm. Why is that so hard? What is the correct way to define a notification service that sends a simple JSON body ‘{a: b}’ to URL xyz using POST method? The documentation comes with no samples whatsoever, and for the life of me I can’t get it to work. The debug options (as far as I know them) are just not sufficient to get a grip on it. It’s very frustrating, tbh, especially when you only find other people as far as two years back just not getting it going…
Any help much appreciated!
What pops into my head is shell_command, but there might be better ways.
Well, there are plenty of workarounds (actually I got it finally working with a plain rest_command), but I wonder whether something as simple and straightforward as a rest notification shouldn‘t either just work (and not make a lot of people just scratch their head and steal their time until they finally choose a different way), or be thrown out from HA altogether? Or provide at least some easy way of debugging the final request (w/o the need of installing a proxy to examine the actual request) to see what HA is doing to the request while figuring out the correct way of parametrizing it. But again, this shouldn‘t even be necessary for such a simple task…
As long as you stay at the easy level, HA works most of the time.
What search terms did you use to research this?
I‘ve searched for homeassistant rest notification. Haven‘t found any reproducible solution that worked for sending a JSON body via POST or POST_JSON. By now I just followed another advice to simply use rest_command, which works as documented. Still puzzled, though, why rest notification not just simply works the same way.