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