LINE Notify replacement: send LINE messages to yourself from Python¶

✅ Verified against LINE Chrome extension 3.7.2 — September 2026 (v2.9.2)

What broke on March 31, 2025¶

LINE Notify was a simple, beloved service: get a token, then POST https://notify-api.line.me/api/notify and the message appeared in your LINE app from "LINE Notify". Server alerts, cron summaries, home-automation pings, RSS digests — an entire ecosystem of personal notification scripts ran on it, many of them in Python.

On March 31, 2025 the service was discontinued. Every token stopped working; the endpoint now refuses all requests. Nothing changed in your code — the service simply went away, and the ~1,500 GitHub repos built on it went silent with it.

What you were left with, officially, was the Messaging API — which is a poor replacement for personal notifications:

You must register at developers.line.biz, create a provider and a Messaging API channel, and get a channel access token — ceremony that LINE Notify never asked for.
You must friend your own bot with your own account before it can message you at all.
The free tier allows roughly 200 push messages per month (re-check the current number — LINE's pricing has changed repeatedly). A script that pings you ten times a day burns through that in three weeks.
The message arrives from a bot, not from you — a separate conversation, a separate notification profile.

If you're sending notifications to yourself, from your own scripts, all of that is friction for a worse result.

The replacement: OkLine¶

OkLine automates your own personal LINE account, so "notify me" becomes "send a message to myself" — free, unlimited, arriving from your own name in your chat with yourself:

pip install okline
okline login     # once: scan the QR, confirm the PIN — saves tokens.json

from okline import OkLine

api = OkLine.from_tokens_file("tokens.json")
api.send_text(api.get_profile()["mid"], "backup finished")  # to yourself

No developer account, no bot channel, no webhook, no monthly cap — and because it's your own account, the session (including your E2EE keychain) persists in tokens.json and is reused forever. Requires Python 3.9+ and Node.js 18+ on your PATH (for X-Hmac request signing).

Migrating: requests → OkLine¶

Your old LINE Notify code probably looked like one of these:

# old — dead since March 31, 2025
import requests

requests.post(
    "https://notify-api.line.me/api/notify",
    headers={"Authorization": "Bearer " + NOTIFY_TOKEN},
    data={"message": "backup finished"},
)

# old — the curl one-liner version
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $NOTIFY_TOKEN" \
     -d "message=backup finished" \
     https://notify-api.line.me/api/notify

The OkLine replacement is five lines, one time:

# new
from okline import OkLine

api = OkLine.from_tokens_file("tokens.json")  # created once by `okline login`
api.send_text(api.get_profile()["mid"], "backup finished")
api.close()

To find api.get_profile()["mid"] once and avoid the extra request, cache it:

ME = "u0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef"  # your own mid, from `okline whoami`
api.send_text(ME, "backup finished")

What you lose: the sticker/stickerPackageId parameters and the imageThumbnail/imageFullImage URL parameters of the old Notify API. What OkLine offers instead is strictly more: stickers (api.send_sticker(me, "11537", "52002744")), real image/video/file sends from your disk (api.send_image(me, "chart.png") — see media), messages to any of your contacts or groups, and E2EE. See messaging for the full send surface.

A reusable `notify.py`¶

Drop-in module with a self-message function, session reuse and auto-refresh — the LINE Notify use case, minus the token:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
"""notify.py — a tiny LINE Notify replacement built on OkLine.

python notify.py "backup finished"
"""

from __future__ import annotations

import sys

from okline import OkLine

TOKENS = "tokens.json"  # created once by `okline login`
_api: OkLine | None = None  # one client per process


def _client() -> OkLine:
    """Reuse one session per process.

    ``from_tokens_file`` restores the access/refresh tokens AND the E2EE
    keychain, and — because the client came from a session file — OkLine
    automatically writes refreshed tokens back to it whenever the server asks
    for a renewal (gateway code 119 / HTTP 401 trigger this transparently).
    So the stored session stays valid across runs.
    """
    global _api
    if _api is None:
        _api = OkLine.from_tokens_file(TOKENS)
    return _api


def notify(text: str) -> None:
    """Send a LINE message to yourself (the old `POST /api/notify`)."""
    api = _client()
    api.send_text(api.get_profile()["mid"], text)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    sys.stdout.reconfigure(encoding="utf-8")  # Thai / emoji on Windows
    notify(" ".join(sys.argv[1:]) or "hello from okline")

Then, anywhere in your codebase:

from notify import notify

notify("cron job started")
notify(f"disk usage {pct:.0f}%")
notify("nightly backup finished")

For proactive renewal (a background timer that renews the token before it goes stale, mirroring the Chrome extension's own schedule), load the client with:

_api = OkLine.from_tokens_file(TOKENS, auto_refresh_schedule=True)

See authentication for what the schedule does.

Going further than Notify ever could¶

Alert on incoming messages, not just send: okline notify --keyword urgent watches your chats and prints alerts — or use the bot framework to trigger anything on arrival.
Notify a group instead of yourself: api.send_text("c1234...", "deploy done") lands in your team group, from you.
From cron, the CLI alone is enough (no Python file needed):

okline send u0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef "backup finished"

Notes¶

Read this first: automating a personal account is against LINE's Terms of Service. OkLine is unofficial; keep the volume human-like and use an account you can afford to lose — the candid risk framing is in the FAQ.
You are sending to your own mid, so messages land in LINE's chat with yourself — the same place LINE Notify messages used to arrive, minus the middleman.
Thai readers: คู่มือฉบับภาษาไทยอยู่ที่ LINE Notify ทางเลือก Python — ส่งแจ้งเตือนฟรี.

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