Notification Center on Jean-Christophe Gay

Desktop notifications for Gradle

Wed, 13 May 2015 17:35:00 +0200

When building projects, time can pass slowly… Most of the time they run as background tasks and I like to have a notification when they have finished.
There is a built-in plugin for Gradle to send notifications but we’ll see how to get more possible notifiers !

Gradle Build Announcements
#

This is the built-in plugin distributed with Gradle. It relies on Announce plugin, which allow sending custom notifications during a build.
It comes with four possible implementations:

twitter
notify-send
Snarl
Growl

It is easy to activate, just add in your build.gradle:

apply plugin: 'build-announcements'

or use it in $HOME/.gradle/init.gradle to have the plugin running by default for all your Gradle projects:

rootProject {
 apply plugin: 'build-announcements'
}

It is really nice to have this functionality available without extra installation… But there is not so much tools available and sent notifications lack of visual distinction (icon is always the same whatever the build result).

Gradle notifier
#

As I already have written my own notifications for Maven with maven-notifier, I have just migrated them to run with Gradle in gradle-notifier!

It comes with support for:

Notifier	Screenshot
Growl, for Windows and OS X.
Snarl, for Windows
terminal-notifier, OS X
notification center OS X (since Mavericks)
notify-send for Linux
SystemTray since Java 6
Pushbullet
Kdialog for KDE
notifu for Windows
AnyBar for OS X and Linux
Toaster for Windows 8
Notify since Java 6
BurntToast for Windows 10
Slack

Installation
#

Plugin can be configured in an initialization script or directly in a build script.

Initialization script
#

Create (or edit) file $HOME/.gradle/init.gradle:

initscript {
 repositories {
 mavenCentral()
 }

 dependencies {
 classpath group: 'fr.jcgay', name: 'gradle-notifier', version: '1.1.0'
 }
}

rootProject {
 apply plugin: fr.jcgay.gradle.notifier.GradleNotifierPlugin
}

Build script
#

In your build.gradle, add:

buildscript {
 repositories {
 mavenCentral()
 }

 dependencies {
 classpath group: 'fr.jcgay', name: 'gradle-notifier', version: '1.1.0'
 }
}

apply plugin: 'fr.jcgay.gradle-notifier'

or by using the plugin mechanism introduced in Gradle 2.1:

plugins {
 id "fr.jcgay.gradle-notifier" version "1.1.0"
}

Configuration
#

It relies on send-notification, notifiers configuration and which notifier to use can be set in $HOME/.send-notification (See available parameters in current documentation).

Or the plugin can be configured using Gradle extension in targeted script:

notifier {
 implementation = 'notificationcenter'
 threshold {
 time = 10
 unit = java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit.SECONDS
 }
 growl {
 port = 23053
 host = 'localhost'
 password = 'azerty123'
 }

Here it is! No more excuses to forgot your ran a build somewhere!

Color and desktop notifications for Maven

Sun, 04 May 2014 17:58:00 +0200

Maven, is not the sexiest tool available out there… Used within your IDE, it will be hidden but it deserve better inside your preferred shell.

Completion
#

There are a couple of bash completion scripts for Maven:

maven-bash-completion is a static list of plugins/goals/options. It is great, but each plugin must be described in the script to have auto completion suggestion.
Another one is available as a ubuntu package.

If you’re a zsh user:

with oh-my-zsh framework, the mvn plugin handle auto completion and you get a bunch of aliases with it too.
in zsh-completions, a script allow to discover plugin goals dynamically the first time you try to reach it (mvn plugin:<TAB>). First completion is a little bit longer but next ones will be immediate (Thanks Thomas Queste).

Desktop Notifications
#

A fast build is awesome… but it is not always possible to have one (for bad or good reasons by the way).
Having to stay in front of your shell to wait for it is not really useful, in that case a desktop notification at the end of the build is your savior.

maven-notifier
#

I have written a Maven extension to send a notification when a build ends: maven-notifier. It works with all major operating systems.
By default, the extension will try to find an available notifier on your system.
It is possible to configure which notifier you want to use (and many more) by creating a maven-notifier.properties file.

Notifier	Screenshot
Growl, for Windows and OS X.	maven-notifier-growl
Snarl, for Windows	maven-notifier-snarl
terminal-notifier, OS X
notification center OS X (since Mavericks)
notify-send for Linux
SystemTray since Java 6
Pushbullet	maven-notifier-pushbullet
Kdialog for KDE	maven-notifier-kdialog
notifu for Windows	maven-notifier-notifu
AnyBar for OS X and Linux	maven-notifier-anybar
Toaster for Windows 8
Notify since Java 6
BurntToast for Windows 10
Slack

Scripts
#

You can also use scripts that will wrap mvn command to get its status and then send a notification.

Growl with growlnotify : Integrate Growl with Maven, maven-growl
notification center with terminal-notifier : maven-notification-center
notify-send : Integrate notify-send with Maven.

Colors
#

Maven standard output is sad. It is not easy to differentiate the various level messages.

maven-color
#

maven-color colorize Maven output.

Since Maven 3.1.0, SLF4J is used internally, meaning you can choose which Logging framework you want to use.
This blog entry explains how you can customize your Maven installation to have colors in your logs with Log4j 2 or Logback. This is how maven-color works.

For older versions (between 3.0.x and 3.1.x) I have used Jansi to write log in color and a java agent to replace dynamically the logger implementation used by Maven. It works with interactive goals but it is kind of hard to install and maintain across Maven different versions. It breaks easily if Maven changes the way they implements their internal code. Grab it at maven-color.

Scripts
#

Some scripts are wrapping mvn command to colorize output:

This is sweet but it does not work with interactive goals. Don’t try to use maven-release-plugin or maven-archetype-plugin in interactive mode, it will poorly fail when you will need to input text.

All in one (OS X)
#

To gain installation time, I have written a brew formula.

brew tap jcgay/jcgay
brew install maven-deluxe

This will install latest Maven version, maven-notifier, maven-color and maven-profiler.

Conclusion
#

Xzibit

Thanks Xzibit for pimping my Maven !

Notification Center on Jean-Christophe Gay

Desktop notifications for Gradle

Gradle Build Announcements #

Gradle notifier #

Installation #

Initialization script #

Build script #

Configuration #

Color and desktop notifications for Maven

Completion #

Desktop Notifications #

maven-notifier #

Scripts #

Colors #

maven-color #

Scripts #

All in one (OS X) #

Conclusion #

Gradle Build Announcements
#

Gradle notifier
#

Installation
#

Initialization script
#

Build script
#

Configuration
#

Completion
#

Desktop Notifications
#

maven-notifier
#

Scripts
#

Colors
#

maven-color
#

Scripts
#

All in one (OS X)
#

Conclusion
#