114 lines
4 KiB
Markdown
114 lines
4 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "Using Slack as a desktop notification center"
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slug: /slack-notification-center/
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date: 2024-04-10
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tags: ["log", "project", "productivity", "javascript"]
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---
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My current desktop environment is very bare-bones and consists basically of a
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window manager and launcher. One difficulty of this is having to manage
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notifications manually.
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Triggering notifications is fine, I use
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[swaync](https://github.com/ErikReider/SwayNotificationCenter). The problem is
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logging them in one place so I can see at a glance what has been going on over a
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given time period. There are solutions for the Wayland compositor that I use but
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the list of notifications won't persist beyond the current session. They are
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also quite ugly with limited options for style customisation.
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When I talk about notifcations, I mainly mean alerts triggered by the automated
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scripts I have running on my system: backups, auto-commits to my Zettelkasten,
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time-tracking etc. I don't care about email notifications, Spotify updates etc
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and suppress these.
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I thought a good way to solve this would be to forgo a desktop-specific
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notification center and instead use Slack. Each notification type has a
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dedicated channel which I can post to via a specific webhook URL. On the
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free-plan the data will persist for up to three months which is more than
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sufficient for my purposes.
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This solution has the added benefit that I can access my notification center
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from other devices. I can also display notifications from more than one machine
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and everything will be syndicated in one place. Additionally, I can leverage
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Slack's extensions like the GitHub bot. Finally, using Slack's block
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architecture means that I have lots of options when it comes to outputting the
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notification contents.
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The image below shows the notification center with the channel for this blog
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displayed:
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(The channel is called "Ripley" because I am an Alien fan! "processes" is the
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parent app to which the different webhooks belong)
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I invoke the NodeJS script below when I want to set up a notification:
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```js
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#!/usr/bin/env node
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const process = require("process")
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const { exec } = require("child_process")
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const axios = require("axios")
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const notificationSound =
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"mpv /home/thomas/dotfiles/gruvbox-95/sounds/st-notification.mp3"
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const slackNotifier = async (channel, { message = "", block = null } = {}) => {
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try {
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const webhooks = {
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test: process.env.SLACK_WEBHOOK_TEST,
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backups: process.env.SLACK_WEBHOOK_BACKUPS,
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eolas: process.env.SLACK_WEBHOOK_EOLAS,
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systems_obscure: process.env.SLACK_WEBHOOK_SYSTEMS_OBSCURE,
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time_tracking: process.env.SLACK_WEBHOOK_TIME_TRACKING,
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}
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const webhookUrl = webhooks[channel]
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let payload
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if (message) {
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payload = { text: message, channel: channel }
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} else if (block) {
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payload = { blocks: block, channel: channel }
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} else {
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throw new Error("Either a message or a block must be provided.")
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}
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const response = await axios.post(webhookUrl, payload)
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if (response.status === 200) {
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exec(notificationSound)
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console.log(`Message successfully sent to ${channel}`)
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} else {
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console.error(
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`Slack API returned non-200 response: ${response.status}`,
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response.data
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)
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}
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} catch (error) {
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console.error(`Failed to send message to ${channel}:`, error)
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}
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}
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if (require.main === module) {
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const [, , channel, message] = process.argv
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slackNotifier(channel, { message }).catch(console.error)
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}
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module.exports = { slackNotifier }
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```
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An example of it being invoked (from within a script that manages my hourly
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backups):
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```sh
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./slack-notifier/src/index.js 'backups' '💾 Error: backup drive not mounted.'
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```
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One drawback is that there is sometimes latency between the execution of the
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script which contains the notificaton trigger and the appearance of the
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notification in Slack. This is because the former happens instantly on my
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machine and the latter depends on the network. I can live with this though.
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