GitHub has two choices for notifications: email or a small blue dot in the corner of the page. As a developer at Doctolib I get lots of notifications throughout the day, which means either frequent email alerts or keeping a close eye on the blue dot.
I wanted something in the middle, so I wrote a script to generate desktop notifications at a frequency I can choose.
Here’s the repository if you want to skip ahead to the code: https://github.com/darrenberg/github-notifications
Notification Content
The GitHub API has everything we need and we can parse the output with a command-line utility called jq.
Authentication and Password Storage
The easiest way to connect to the GitHub API is by creating a personal access token, which can be scoped to only access notifications.
However, storing this token in my script wouldn’t be very secure, so I used the MacOS Keychain.
It’s easy to add an entry from Keychain Access and you can retrieve it from the command line with find-generic-password. For more information, check out https://www.netmeister.org/blog/keychain-passwords.html
Desktop Notifications
I used terminal-notifier to create the desktop notification. You can control whether it’s a banner or alert in the MacOS Notification Preferences.
echo "Piped Message Data!" | terminal-notifier -sound default
The Script!
#!/bin/bash
USER=$(git config user.email)
TOKEN=$(security find-generic-password -a github_token -w)
while true
do
curl -s -u $USER:$TOKEN https://api.github.com/notifications \
| jq -r '.[] | select(.unread) | [.subject.type, .reason, .subject.title] | @sh \
| xargs -n 3 sh -c \
'terminal-notifier -title "GitHub Notification" -subtitle "$0 $1" -message "$2" -open “https://github.com/notifications"'
sleep $(($1 * 60))
done
Simply pass the number of minutes to wait between calls (e.g. ./notify.sh 10 will run every 10 minutes) and it will show you all your unread notifications with a link to GitHub. Or take out the infinite loop and run it as a cron job.
Detailed installation instructions can be found at https://github.com/darrenberg/github-notifications
Conclusion
According to Larry Wall, the original author of the Perl programming language, there are three great virtues of a programmer; Laziness, Impatience and Hubris:
Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don’t have to answer so many questions about it.
Come be lazy at Doctolib!
https://about.doctolib.com/careers/engineering.html
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