SenBox — Stream Events to Any Notification Channel
Describe what happened once, in one vocabulary. SenBox decides how to deliver it to each destination, hides every per-channel difference, and answers with a single predictable result.
The Problem
Notification code is written once per team, per service and per channel. Feishu, WeChat Work, SMS, voice calls and WhatsApp each expect a different message shape, a different way to authenticate, and a different way to report failure. So every service, every operations script and every AI agent carries its own copy of “how to notify” — with the channel secret usually pasted in next to it.
And none of it composes. You can filter logs with grep and move files with mv, but you cannot pipe a stream of events into an alert the same way. Batch alerting, pipeline-triggered notification and unattended agent alerting all turn into custom programs.
The Solution
SenBox is a Unix-native notification gateway that behaves like the tools already in your pipeline: one static binary, no runtime, no configuration file required, no interactive prompt — and it reads a stream on stdin, one event per line, dispatching as events arrive.
Core idea: one event format → per-channel drivers → dispatch
- Write the alert once; change only the destination name
- Pipe monitoring output, log lines or JSON events straight into notifications
- Secrets stay in the operating system’s protected credential store — never in argv, never in env, never in files in your repo
Core Value
| What You Get | How It Works |
|---|---|
| One event format for every channel | Write the alert once; change only the destination name |
| Streaming by design | tail -f app.log \| sendx stream --channel feishu dispatches as events arrive, exactly like grep |
| Secrets stay in the OS keystore | Read only from macOS Keychain, Windows Credential Manager, Linux Secret Service — never from the environment or repo files |
| Built for unattended use | No prompts, no windows, distinct exit codes and a machine-readable run summary, so CI jobs and AI agents can branch on the result |
| Two forms, one core | Use the sendx CLI, or embed the same core through a language-neutral C ABI (libsenbox + senbox.h) |
| Cheap to extend | A new destination is a self-contained driver; the event format, routing and result contract stay untouched |
Key Features
1. One-Line Send
sendx send --channel feishu "message" — text or rich formatted output to any channel.
2. Streaming Dispatch
... | sendx stream --channel feishu — one event per line, plain text or JSON, dispatched as it arrives.
3. Unified Event Model
Severity, source, title, body, timestamp and labels — the same fields for every destination.
4. Severity Filtering
--min-severity warn drops everything below the threshold before dispatch.
5. Routing Rules
Declare once which severities and sources go where; callers stop repeating routing decisions. Fan-out sends one event to several destinations with one combined answer.
6. Faithful Dry Run
--dry-run parses, filters and routes without delivering — safe to validate rules in production.
7. Feishu Channel
Group robot delivery, text and interactive card, signature computed automatically when the robot requires one. Retry with exponential back-off on transient failures, a hard time limit per attempt.
8. Result Contract
Distinct exit codes for full success, partial success and total failure, plus a senbox.run_summary/v1 JSON record on every run.
9. Self-Check
sendx doctor verifies destination address, secret availability and reachability without messaging a real group.
10. Embeddable Core
C ABI library (libsenbox) with a stable senbox.h header for embedding in any language.
Quick Start
# 1. Point SenBox at your Feishu group robot (non-secret, so env is fine)
export SENDX_FEISHU_WEBHOOK_URL="https://open.feishu.cn/open-apis/bot/v2/hook/xxxx"
# 2. Store the robot's sign secret once, in the OS keystore (never in a file)
sendx secret set feishu_bot_secret
# 3. Send
sendx send --channel feishu --severity error \
--source payment-api "Checkout latency above SLO"
# 4. Or stream — dispatch every warning-or-worse line as it appears
tail -f /var/log/app.log | sendx stream --channel feishu --min-severity warn
# 5. Verify wiring without messaging anyone
sendx doctor --channel feishu
Download
| Platform | Download | Requirements |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Latest Release | Windows 10+ (x64) |
| macOS | Latest Release | macOS 11+ (Intel & Apple Silicon) |
| Linux | Latest Release | Ubuntu 20.04+ (x64) |
Chinese users can download from Gitee Releases.
Each release ships static senbox-<target>-<os>.tar.gz archives. Download one file, unpack, run — no dependencies, no install steps.
Privacy
- No telemetry, no analytics — SenBox talks to exactly one place: the notification channel you name
- Secrets never leave the keystore — channel secrets are read from the OS protected credential store and never written to disk, never placed in the environment, and never printed — not in logs, not in errors, not in the JSON summary
- Memory only for delivery — event content is held in memory only as long as delivery takes; SenBox keeps no local history in V1.0
Status
v1.0.0 Released — core engine, sendx CLI, and senbox-ffi C SDK are feature-complete, hardened (10 security tests, full E2E suite), and release-tested across Linux, macOS and Windows.