unittest-notifier - a somewhat portable notifier

What It Is

unittest-notifier takes a command and runs it. Woot? Yes, but before it starts it makes a notification on your screen/desktop using a mechanism that it can find. And when the command is finished it makes another notification with "Passed" or "Failed" depending on the return code of the command.

The name might now make it clear that a typical command to run would be to run your unittests. But of course you can give it any command.

In the future there might be options to change what is show in the notifications, making it a bit more general.

System Requirements

unittest-notifier is a shell script so it can run only on MacOS, Linux, Cygwin and now "Bash on Windows".

To make it do its thing you need a notification mechanism in the form of command line-capable program.

The Story

The unittest-notifier was born in an attempt to create an environment where unittests are run automatically as soon as you save a file.

There are a number of utilities that can watch a set of files or a part of your file system for changes (entr, ionotify, fswatch, ...) which all have different quirks.

But I could not find an even reasonably portable notification mechanism. As I develop a few portable programs (notably cgreen and alan) this was high on my wish-list.

Having already made a stab at a monitor command to monitor file changes I felt the notification was a nice challenge.

Supported Notification Mechanisms

MacOS/Darwin

• terminal-notifier (https://github.com/julienXX/terminal-notifier)

Linux

• notify-send (sudo <pkgmgr> install notify-send)

Cygwin

On Cygwin we need a Windows program, but since Cygwin runs Windows .exe:s just fine, you just need to make the command available in your Cygwin shell, e.g. by putting it in a directory included in your PATH or by adding the directory where they are located to your PATH.

• snoretoast - uses the native Windows 8/10 notification mechanism (https://github.com/KDE/snoretoast)
• growlnotify - included with Growl for Windows (http://www.growlforwindows.com/gfw/)

Bash on Windows

Since the Linux layer can't run Windows programs (yet, at least) the only way that seems to work is to install cbwin from https://github.com/xilun/cbwin, use outbash.exe instead of "Bash for Windows" and then call wrun to excute one or the other notification mechanisms that works for Cygwin.

This is work in progress.