Anything that you're willing to implement yourself. After preconditions for sending a notification are met, the script will try to execute configured script inside the scripts directory. This means, that if you have an existing script/workflow for notifying users, say, through XMPP messages, SMS, e-mail, IRC, and so on, you can easily import it and run it.

Why bother using it?

If your workflow is a little bit unorthodox, but you already have a working setup, then stolat with the help of cron checks the brithdays for you. This is exceptionally useful if you manage a multi-user service/server. You don't need to worry about checking the date, but still have the flexibility over what should be ran when it's time to notify a user.

How does it work?

With the power of cron, you set up a daily cron-job, e.g. at 8 AM, which will check if any of the people whose birthdays have been entered is close to their birthday. Then, a script of yours gets passed some arguments and is executed. What you do with this data is up to you. People willing to get notified can request additional reminders, for example 3 days before a birthday. By default, only on the day of the birthday a notification is sent. This is configurable in the list.toml file.

Sample config

A sample config has been put into list.example.toml. Here's an excerpt:

preferences = [
	{user="bob@localhost",   channels=[0]},
	{user="alice@localhost", channels=[0], "additional_reminders"=[1, 7]}
]

birthdays = [
	{name="Bob",   date="2000-01-01", to_notify=["alice@localhost"]},
	{name="Alice", date="2000-01-23", to_notify=["bob@localhost"]}
]

actions = [
	{id=0, name="print information", name_of_script="sample_script.py", startup_function="print_v1_data"}
]

Above allows Bob to receive notifications about Alice's birthdays, and Alice to get reminded about Bob's birthday on the day of his birthday, but also 1 and 7 days prior. When they're meant to be notified, a method inside sample_script.py (in the scripts directory) called print_v1_data will be ran, with the API version and appropriate data passed. For API version "v1" these are: notifyee's username, name of the person, age, days until birthday (0 if it's the day of the birthday), and birthday date.

For the cron job, a sample config would look something like:

0 7 * * * python3 /path/to/stolat/notify.py

This would make it run every day at 7 o'clock every day. It's important to make it run once per day, otherwise users will get notified as many times, as the script is run!