Ruby Growl Notifications in Windows

I previously posted an update that enables Growl notifications for Autotest in Windows.

Which is nice, but what about other Ruby programs, they might want to send Growl notifications too. To this end Vision Media have produced a Ruby Growl gem which makes it easy for any Ruby program to send Growl notifications.

But the visionmedia-growl gem only works on OSX.

Now With Added Windows Support

So I had a go at adding Windows support. The short version is that it works, but the code is seriously ugly and not well tested (you have been warned!).

Check out my visionmedia-growl fork. Or just install the gem:

sudo gem install karl-growl --source http://gems.github.com

Packaging growlnotify

First up I decided to package both the OSX and Windows versions of growlnotify with the gem.

This is a departure from the existing gem, which requires that you have installed growlnotify yourself. I wanted to be able to include this gem in new projects without having to bother users to download extra dependencies.

Choose the Right growlnotify

I decide which growlnotify to use by checking which platform we are running on:

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  def self.is_windows?
    processor, platform, *rest = RUBY_PLATFORM.split("-")
    platform == 'mswin32'
  end
 
  ##
  # Execute +args+ against the binary.
 
  def self.exec *args
    bin = PACKAGED_BIN
    bin += '.com' if is_windows?
 
    Kernel.system bin, *args
  end

Different Switches on Different Operating Systems

The biggest headache with adding Windows support was adding the ability to generate Windows style command line arguments.

Example OSX command line:

growlnotify --message llamas --title Llama! --image images/llama.png

Example Windows command line:

growlnotify.com llamas /t:Llama! /i:images/llama.png

Note that in the Windows command line, switches are specified with /x: prefix, and no space. The names of the switches don’t correspont exactly with the OSX ones.

Also, with the Windows version of growlnotify you don’t give an switch for the message body, just include it as the first argument.

Adding Support for Windows Style Switches

The first part of adding this support was to map the OSX switches to their Windows counterparts (where they existed).

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    switch :title,      :t
    switch :sticky,     :s
    switch :priority,   :p
    switch :host,       :host
    switch :password,   :pass
    switch :port,       :port
 
    switch :name,       :a
    switch :message,    :EMPTY
    switch :image,      :i
    switch :identifier, :id
 
    switch :iconpath,   nil
    switch :appIcon,    nil
    switch :icon,       nil
 
    switch :udp,        nil
    switch :auth,       :hash
    switch :crypt,      nil

As you can see, not all OSX switches are available in the Windows version of growlnotify. I dealt with this at the moment, by just stripping out any switches that won’t work in Windows.

Finally I altered (hacked?) the Growl run method, to produce parameter strings for either OSX or Windows.

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    def run
      raise Error, 'message required' unless message
      self.class.switches.each do |name, win_name|
        if send(:"#{name}?")
          value = send(name).to_s if send(name) && !(TrueClass === send(name))
          if is_windows?
            next if win_name.nil?
 
            switch = (win_name == :EMPTY) ? "" : "/#{win_name}:"
            args << switch + value
          else
            args << "--#{name}"
            args << value
          end
        end
      end
      Growl.exec *args
    end

The main points of interest here are the The windows switches don’t have any space between the switch name and the value. So instead they are concatenated together into a single string.

Finally we deal with the special case where using the Windows version of growlnotify we need to add the message parameter without a switch, so we use the special token :EMPTY to deal with this.

The Result

The results of this is a Ruby gem that supports Growl notifications in Windows. The gem can be installed with the following commands:

sudo gem install karl-growl --source http://gems.github.com

And used in your Ruby program as follows:

Growl.notify {
    self.message = 'Hello World'
    self.image = File.join 'path', 'to', 'image.png'
  }

For more usage examples see the karl-growl site.

Known Issues

There are a few known issues. The biggest of which no support for normalised icons.

To support OSX and Windows always give a path to an image, e.g.

  :image => 'path/to/image.png'

There are a number of switches that only work in OSX, and are ignored in Windows. Unsupported switches are:

  :iconpath
  :appIcon
  :icon
  :udp
  :crypt

The gem has only received the most cursory of testing, so there may be a whole host of other issues, be warned!

The Future

I’m treating the current version of this gem, as a design spike, a proof of concept that shows we can have cross Operating System support. The code is a real mess, and has no unit tests, but I’m releasing it here to follow the ‘better now beats best later’ rule.

I hope to refactor the code into something more production worthy when I get a chance.