7. Make it safe to leave alone

Notifications that reach you, a second factor on your account, and Noust and the system kept up to date.

Tutorial Updated 29 October 2026 View as Markdown

Goal: you hear about a failed deploy or a certificate about to expire before your users do, your account needs a second factor, and Noust keeps itself up to date.

Time: ten minutes.

You need: Noust installed, and a place to receive messages: Slack, Discord, Telegram, Microsoft Teams, Matrix, ntfy, email or a webhook of your own.

The examples send Kelmoor's alerts to a Slack channel of its operations team.

Steps

Add a notification channel. In Slack, create an incoming webhook for the channel, then:
Shell
```
noust notify channel set kelmoor-ops --type slack --secret webhook_url
```
--secret asks for the webhook's address without showing it. Noust stores it sealed and never shows it again. In the console: Settings > Channels.
Test it.
Shell
```
noust notify test kelmoor-ops
```
A test message should arrive in the Slack channel within seconds.
Turn notifications on. They are off until you do, so a half-configured channel sends nothing.
Shell
```
noust config set notifications.enabled true
```
From now on a failed deploy, a backup that did not run, a certificate close to expiry and an application that stops answering reach the channel.
Protect your account with a second factor. In the console, open the menu under your avatar, Account > Sign-in security, and add an authenticator app or a passkey. You need it anyway to publish the console on a name of its own or to manage other servers from this one.
Keep a copy of the backups off the server. If you skipped it, do step 4 of Back it up.
Let Noust update itself.
Shell
```
noust self-update set --enable --channel patch --window 03:00-05:00
```
The server then installs the patch releases of the version it runs, between 3 and 5 in the morning on its clock. security installs only releases that fix a vulnerability; stable also takes a new minor version. A new major version is never installed by itself.
Look at the operating system's own updates.
Shell
```
noust server updates list
```
Security updates are listed first. In the console: Server > Updates.

What you should see

Shell

noust notify list         # your channel, enabled
noust self-update show    # the channel, the window and when it last ran
noust health              # disk, web server, applications, certificates and memory, at a glance

noust health only reads. Run it whenever you come back to a server after a while.

If it fails

The test message does not arrive: noust notify deliveries shows what went out and what the service answered, verbatim. A wrong webhook address is the usual cause: set it again with the same noust notify channel set command.
Messages stop arriving later: a channel that fails is retried, and noust notify retry sends again what failed. Notifications and alerts covers quiet hours, routes per project and alert rules on CPU, memory and disk.
You lost your authenticator: as root on the server, noust user reset-mfa USERNAME removes it, and you enrol a new one at your next sign-in. A backup code, if you kept them, also signs you in.

You have a server you can leave alone. From here: Add a server to your fleet, or, if you are coming from another platform, Move your applications from Coolify or Dokploy. Next steps lists the rest by what you want to do.