Notifications

FDDB Exporter can send a Telegram message when the scheduled export cannot parse a day. It is the one thing that happens without you watching, so it is the one thing worth a push notification.

Notifications are enabled by default, but nothing is sent until a bot token and a chat id are configured — with the defaults in place the feature is on and idle.

What triggers a message

Situation	Notification	Log
The scheduled export cannot parse yesterday's diary page	Message sent	warn
Logging in to fddb.info fails	none	error: not logged in - skipping job execution
Another export was already running, so the scheduled run was skipped	none	warn
A manual export via the REST API, Web UI or MCP fails	none	depends on the caller

Only the scheduled export notifies, and only for a parse failure. The reasoning: a scheduled run is unattended, and a day that cannot be parsed is silently missing from your data until you notice. Everything else either has someone watching the response, or is not a failure — a skipped run means an export was already happening, and yesterday is picked up by the next run.

A parse failure most often means there was nothing logged for that day — see Troubleshooting. If you routinely skip logging days, expect a message on those mornings, or turn notifications off.

Configuration

Variable	Default	Description
FDDB-EXPORTER_NOTIFICATION_ENABLED	true	Send a Telegram message when a scheduled export fails to parse
FDDB-EXPORTER_NOTIFICATION_TELEGRAM_TOKEN	-	Bot token from BotFather
FDDB-EXPORTER_NOTIFICATION_TELEGRAM_CHATID	-	The chat to send to

TIP

export in a POSIX shell rejects the hyphens — use the all-underscore form (FDDB_EXPORTER_NOTIFICATION_ENABLED) there. See the note on the hyphens.

The token is a credential: prefer a Kubernetes secret, a Docker secret or a Jasypt-encrypted property over a plain environment variable.

Getting a bot token and a chat id

1. In Telegram, open a chat with @BotFather and send /newbot. Follow the prompts for a name and a username. BotFather replies with a token of the form 123456789:AAF... — that is FDDB-EXPORTER_NOTIFICATION_TELEGRAM_TOKEN.

2. Send any message to your new bot. A bot cannot start a conversation, so without this first message it has no chat to reply to.

3. Fetch the chat id:

   curl "https://api.telegram.org/bot<YOUR_TOKEN>/getUpdates"

   In the response, result[0].message.chat.id is your chat id — a number, negative for groups. That is FDDB-EXPORTER_NOTIFICATION_TELEGRAM_CHATID.

Turning it off

docker run -e 'FDDB-EXPORTER_NOTIFICATION_ENABLED=false' ghcr.io/itobey/fddb-exporter

Parse failures are still logged at warn, so nothing becomes invisible — it just stops reaching your phone.

It is enabled but nothing arrives

• Failed to send Telegram message in the log. The message was attempted and Telegram rejected it. The response description is logged with it: a wrong token gives Unauthorized, a wrong or never-messaged chat gives chat not found.
• No log line at all. Nothing triggered a notification. Only a parse failure in the scheduled run does; check whether the scheduler ran at all (/actuator/scheduledtasks lists the registered cron tasks) and whether FDDB-EXPORTER_SCHEDULER_ENABLED is still true.
• Messages render oddly. Messages are sent with Telegram's Markdown parse mode.