GitPedia

Notify rust

☝️send desktop notifications from your Rust app.

From hoodie·Updated June 13, 2026·View on GitHub·

A not so well-named library for displaying desktop notifications. The project is written primarily in Rust, distributed under the Apache License 2.0 license, first published in 2015. It has gained significant community traction with 1,401 stars and 100 forks on GitHub. Key topics include: convenience, desktop-notifications, linux, macos, xdg.

Latest release: v4.17.0
May 17, 2026View Changelog →
<div align="center">

notify-rust

build
Crates.io
contributors
maintenance

version
documentation
license

</div>

A not so well-named library for displaying desktop notifications.

toml
[dependencies] notify-rust = "4"

Usage & Documentation

Please see the documentation for current examples.

Simple Notification

rust
use notify_rust::Notification; Notification::new() .summary("Firefox News") .body("This will almost look like a real firefox notification.") .icon("firefox") .show()?;

Persistent Notification

rust
use notify_rust::{Notification, Hint}; Notification::new() .summary("Category:email") .body("This has nothing to do with emails.\nIt should not go away until you acknowledge it.") .icon("thunderbird") .appname("thunderbird") .hint(Hint::Category("email".to_owned())) .hint(Hint::Resident(true)) // this is not supported by all implementations .timeout(0) // this however is .show()?;

Linux/BSD support

The main audience of this library are Linux/BSD based desktop environments that follow the XDG specification (see gnome dev docs or libnotify docs). These include KDE, Gnome, XFCE, LXDC, Mate (and probably also most others that I haven't personally tested).

Features

images

Enables sending of images with notifications via the image_data() / pixel-buffer API. This is only supported on XDG and requires the image crate as well as lazy_static to determine the supported spec-version on startup.

Note on image_path(): Passing an image by file path via image_path() does not require the images feature on any platform. On Linux/BSD it maps to the image-path XDG hint, on macOS it maps to content_image in mac-notification-sys, and on Windows it is passed directly to winrt-notification — all without any additional dependencies.

d

Enables the usage of dbus-rs instead of zbus (also XDG only).
This is functionally identical to the default feature set.
As long as you still compile with default-features this will only enable dbus-rs usage, but not default to it! In order to use the dbus-rs implementation set the environment variable DBUSRS or compile notify-rust with --no-default-features.

macOS support

This library shines on linux and bsd, which is its original target platform.
Lately it gained support for macOS thanks to mac-notification-sys.
However this only includes a small subset of the current functionality, since NSNotifications don't have as many features.

call for participation: You are a versed macOS UI developer with mad Objective-C skillz? <abbr title="pull request sil vous plait">PRSV</abbr>.

Windows support

Similar to macOS we support windows via the help of winrt-notification.

Commandline tool

Checkout toastify, it exposes most of the functionality of the lib to the commandline.

Contributing

Any help in form of descriptive and friendly issues or comprehensive pull requests are welcome!

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in notify-rust by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.

Conventions

The Changelog of this library is generated from its commit log, there any commit message must conform with https://www.conventionalcommits.org/en/v1.0.0/. For simplicity you could make your commits with convco.

Recognition

Thanks goes to these wonderful people:

<a href="https://github.com/hoodie/notify-rust/graphs/contributors"> <img src="https://contrib.rocks/image?repo=hoodie/notify-rust" /> </a>

License

<sup> `notify-rust` is licensed under either of <a href="LICENSE-APACHE">Apache License, Version 2.0</a> or <a href="LICENSE-MIT">MIT license</a> at your option. </sup> <br> <sub> Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in this crate by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions. </sub>

Contributors

Showing top 12 contributors by commit count.

View all contributors on GitHub →

This article is auto-generated from hoodie/notify-rust via the GitHub API.Last fetched: 6/14/2026