alert: Notify your desktop or mobile device when a job completes

WORK IN PROGRESS. This is under heavy development the week of 8 May 2017.

At Faraday, we have a lot of long-running processes, and we need an easy way to know when they complete. The alert command is intended to make it easy to know when things succeed or fail:

# Supply a pushover.net application token.  We'll make it easy to create these
# soon.
export PUSHOVER_TOKEN=...
# Supply your pushover.net user key.
export PUSHOVER_USER=...

# Run a command and report what happens.
alert run my_long_running_command

# Run a command repeatedly, looking for outputs that indicate success or
# failure.
alert watch -s 'myjob.*failed' -f 'myjob.*success' --timout 300 \
    pachctl list-jobs

This will play different sounds for success and failure.

Right now, we support Superblock, LLC's Pushover system, which provides excellent, hard-to-miss notifications for iOS, Android and web browsers. (This application has no relation to Superblock, LLC. We just use their API.)

We also have support for desktop notifiations and the open source Notify app, but the CLI for configurating them isn't finished yet. To use desktop notifications, try:

export ALERT_NOTIFIER=desktop

Wish list

Some features which we want to add:

• A command-line interface for configuring notification backends easily.
• Terminal support for alert watch.
• Maybe some sort of mode for watching to see when a host has finished booting?

Installing

On Linux, you'll need to install the dbus-1 dev packages.

# Ubuntu, etc.
sudo apt install libdbus-1-dev

Once this is done, install Rust and alert:

curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh
cargo install alert