Get a text when your server goes down

Yes. Homing Pigeon (homingpigeon.dev) lets a small script text your phone when your site or server stops responding, so you hear about it before your users do.

What to tell your agent

Use Homing Pigeon to text me if my site goes down.

Your agent asks for your number, you read back the six-digit code, and it does the rest.

How it works in code

Save this as check.sh. It texts you if the address does not answer within 10 seconds.

#!/bin/sh
if ! curl -fsS --max-time 10 https://example.com/health > /dev/null; then
  homingpigeon send "example.com is down." --idempotency-key "down-$(date +%Y%m%d%H)"
fi

Then run it every five minutes from cron:

*/5 * * * * PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin /home/me/check.sh

Good to know

• The hour in the idempotency key means a long outage texts you once an hour, not every five minutes.
• Run the check from a different machine than the one it watches. A server that is fully down cannot report itself.
• Install the command with npm install -g homingpigeondev and verify your phone first, as the same user the cron job runs as.

Get started

Add Homing Pigeon to Claude Code, then ask for what you want:

claude mcp add homingpigeondev -- npx -y homingpigeondev mcp

You get 50 free texts every month, on US mobile numbers. See more use cases.