notify-send-http

Trigger notify-send across the network using HTTP, useful for triggering notifications from local VMs / Containers into your own computer. It even supports notification icons!

Tested on Ubuntu 14.04 only

Why?

Because I do all of my dev work on virtualized environments and I use guard quite a lot to keep my Ruby tests running when files get changed. The problem is that its builtin notification support will trigger a notify-send inside the virtual environment instead of my machine.

With notify-send-http I can run an HTTP server on my machine and make use of a custom notify-send executable on my virtual environments that has the same interface as the original command and will send notifications to the HTTP server so that I can see alerts poping up on my screen whenever the build fails.

Server setup

First you'll need to download the HTTP server on the machine where notifications will get displayed and drop it somewhere on your PATH.

For example, if $HOME/bin is on your PATH:

curl -L https://github.com/fgrehm/notify-send-http/releases/download/v0.2.0/server-linux_amd64 > $HOME/bin/notify-send-server
chmod +x $HOME/bin/notify-send-server

Then fire up the server with:

PORT=12345 notify-send-server

If you are on an Ubuntu machine, you can set it up to start automatically after logging in to the machine:

cat <<-STR > ~/.config/autostart/notify-send-server.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=env PORT=12345 ${HOME}/bin/notify-send-server
Hidden=false
NoDisplay=false
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true
Name[en_US]=NotifySend server
Name=NotifySend server
Comment[en_US]=
Comment=
STR

Client setup

From another machine / VM / Linux Container you'll have to first download the client somewhere on the PATH:

curl -L https://github.com/fgrehm/notify-send-http/releases/download/v0.2.0/client-linux_amd64 | sudo tee /usr/local/bin/notify-send &>/dev/null
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/notify-send

Then point the CLI to the notification server:

SERVER_IP=$(ip route|awk '/default/ { print $3 }')
export NOTIFY_SEND_URL="http://${SERVER_IP}:12345"

And trigger notifications with:

notify-send "A summary" "Some message"

Integration

Devstep

Download the client to a folder under $HOME/devstep/bin:

DEVSTEP_DIR="$HOME/devstep/bin"
mkdir -p $DEVSTEP_DIR
curl -sL https://github.com/fgrehm/notify-send-http/releases/download/v0.2.0/client-linux_amd64 > $DEVSTEP_DIR/notify-send
chmod +x $DEVSTEP_DIR/notify-send

Add to your $HOME/devstep.yml:

volumes:
  # Share executable with container
  - '{{env "HOME"}}/devstep/bin/notify-send:/.devstep/bin/notify-send'
environment:
  # Set to a different IP if your docker0 bridge is set to something else
  NOTIFY_SEND_URL: "http://172.17.42.1:12345"

Docker

# Grab Docker bridge IP
DOCKER_BRIDGE_IP=$(/sbin/ifconfig docker0 | grep 'inet addr:' | cut -d: -f2 | awk '{ print $1}')

# Download binary
curl -sL https://github.com/fgrehm/notify-send-http/releases/download/v0.2.0/client-linux_amd64 > /tmp/notify-send && chmod +x /tmp/notify-send

# Start container ready to send notifications
docker run -ti --rm \
           -e NOTIFY_SEND_URL="http://${DOCKER_BRIDGE_IP}:12345" \
           -v /tmp/notify-send:/usr/bin/notify-send \
           -v `pwd`/success.png:/tmp/success.png \
           ubuntu:14.04 \
           /usr/bin/notify-send "Hello docker" "It Works!" -i /tmp/success.png

Vagrant

# Vagrantfile API/syntax version. Don't touch unless you know what you're doing!
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "<YOUR BOX>"
  config.vm.provision :shell,
                      path: 'https://github.com/fgrehm/notify-send-http/raw/master/vagrant-installer.sh',
                      args: ['12345']
end

TODO

• Handle other notify-send parameters
• Implement support for other notifiers / platforms