dog-help-scheduler

Random "fake walk" reminders to help a dog with separation anxiety.

My dog panics when the departure routine starts — keys, shoes, door. The therapy is desensitization: perform the routine several times a day without actually leaving (fake walks), at unpredictable times, until the cues stop meaning "you're being abandoned". This app plans those fake walks at random times every day, pushes each one to my phone via ntfy, and tracks whether they were done — with an EasyAdmin backoffice to tune everything.

How it works

Symfony Scheduler (cron 00:05, Europe/Paris)
        │  PlanDayMessage
        ▼
DayPlanner + RandomScheduleGenerator
  → for each enabled notification type, picks N random times
    inside its daily window, respecting a minimum gap
        │  one delayed SendNotificationMessage per slot (Doctrine transport)
        ▼
Messenger worker → NtfyPublisher (JSON publish)
        │
        ▼
📱 Push notification with 3 action buttons
   ✅ Validé   🔁 Reporter   ❌ Non effectué
        │  HTTP callback  /n/{id}/{token}/{status}
        ▼
Status recorded → dashboard stats + Mercure live refresh

Key behaviors, all covered by tests:

• Random spread with guaranteed gap — N uniform draws over the window's slack, sorted, then shifted by the minimum gap: always valid, uniformly distributed (RandomScheduleGenerator).
• Idempotent planning — a type is never planned twice for the same day; the daily trigger, the app:plan-day command and the backoffice "plan now" button all share DayPlanner.
• Missed-run catch-up — the schedule is stateful (checkpoint in a Postgres-backed cache pool), so a trigger missed during downtime fires on restart.
• Smart postpone — "🔁 Reporter" re-sends after the type's delay, staggered behind other pending postpones (no burst repop) plus a random jitter.
• Secure callbacks — each notification carries a random response token; buttons work without being logged in, but only for that one notification.

Backoffice

EasyAdmin 5, protected by Discord OAuth restricted to a single whitelisted user ID.

• Dashboard — validated/postponed/missed counts per week, month or all-time, auto-refreshed live through Mercure (hub embedded in FrankenPHP).
• Notification types — message content, ntfy tags, daily window, count per day, minimum gap, postpone delay + jitter, enable/disable.
• Notifications — the day's plan, statuses, cancel (e.g. a day away from home), trigger one immediately.
• Settings — ntfy topic, editable without redeploying (falls back to the NTFY_TOPIC env var).

Stack

• Symfony 8.1 (PHP 8.4) — Scheduler, Messenger (Doctrine transport), Mercure
• FrankenPHP — app server + embedded Mercure hub
• PostgreSQL 18 — data, message queue and scheduler checkpoint
• EasyAdmin 5 — backoffice
• ntfy — push notifications with quick-reply action buttons
• Docker Swarm + Traefik — deployment behind traefik-base
• Make + Castor — task automation (shared submodule)

Quick start

Requires Docker (Swarm mode), Make, Castor and traefik-base running.

git clone --recurse-submodules git@github.com:barlito/dog-help-scheduler.git
cd dog-help-scheduler

# Configure secrets in .env.local: NTFY_TOPIC (treat it as a password),
# DISCORD_CLIENT_ID / DISCORD_CLIENT_SECRET / DISCORD_ALLOWED_USER_ID

make docker.deploy
make composer.install
make doctrine.migrate

App runs at https://doghelp.local.barlito.fr (php + worker + db services). Create your notification types in the backoffice, then test the pipe end to end:

make docker.bash
bin/console app:notify:test   # immediate ntfy push with the 3 buttons
bin/console app:plan-day      # plan the rest of today

Commands

# Stack
make docker.deploy            # Deploy dev stack (php + worker + db)
make docker.bash              # Shell into the PHP container
make deploy.prod              # Prod deploy: backup → migrate → smoke test
make undeploy                 # Remove stack

# Database
make doctrine.migrate         # Run migrations
make doctrine.diff            # Generate migration from entity changes
make db.backup                # pg_dump (custom format) to /srv/doghelp/backups

# Quality
make cs_fixer                 # PHP CS Fixer (fix)
make phpcs                    # PHP CodeSniffer
make phpmd                    # PHP Mess Detector

# Tests
make phpunit                  # PHPUnit test suite

Tests

PHPUnit 12 suites live in tests/: the random generator (gap/window guarantees), day planning (idempotency, delayed dispatch), the send handler (cancel, double-delivery guard, failure path), the ntfy payload factory, the response controller (token check, postpone stagger) and the admin dashboard.

make phpunit

CI/CD

• entrypoint.yaml — on every push: code quality (PHP CS Fixer, PHPCS, PHPMD) + PHPUnit, both against a compose-deployed CI stack.
• release.yaml — on GitHub release: builds and pushes the barlito/doghelp and barlito/doghelp-worker images to Docker Hub.
• deploy.yaml — manual dispatch: rolling update (or full re-deploy) of the Swarm stack over SSH, with DB backup, migrations and a smoke test.