chirp-pushover — command line notifier for Pushover

Pushover is a service that manages push notifications for iPhone and Android devices. chirp is a command line tool that can push notifications to your phone, e.g. for when a job completes, an error is encountered, etc.

genome_assembly.sh && chirp success -m "Genome assembly complete"

Chirp also includes a simple Bash wrapper script (installed by chirp config) that can be used to pass more information to the message about the command, e.g. the total runtime duration and the exit status. For example,

chirper -t "Genome assembly" genome_assembly.sh

will send push notifications like "Command successful: genome_assembly.sh (Exit code: 0, Duration: 12h 12m 3s)" or "Command failed: genome_assembly.sh (Exit code: 1, Duration: 2h 12m 11s)" depending on the exit status, etc.

Chip Installation and Pushover Setup

1. First, install the Chirp command line tool using Rust's cargo command. If you do not have Rust installed, it is extremely easy to get going: just follow the instructions here: https://rustup.rs. Then, install chirp with:

   cargo install chirp-pushover
   

2. Then, download the iPhone or Android Pushover app, depending on your type of device.

3. Open the app. At this point, you probably want to pay the one-time $5 cost.

4. Visit https://pushover.net and save your user key somewhere.

5. Then, we need to register the chirp application with Pushover. To do this visit https://pushover.net/apps/build and for the name, fill "chirp" (or, whatever you like). You can leave the other boxes empty, but check the service terms box, and press submit. This should bring you to a page that has the API token on it.

6. Finally run the one-time configuration of the for your machine that links the chirp tool with Pushover by running:

   chirp config --api-token <API_TOKEN> --user-key <USER_KEY>
   

   This saves these tokens in ~.pushover_tokens.yml, and also installs a Bash-wrapper script in ~/.local/bin/chirper. This simple Bash script wraps command calls, which allows more information to be passed directly into messages sent by chirp (e.g. the exit status and run time duration).

Using Chirp

Chirp is a very simply command line tool. See chirp --help for a list of all subcommands. To send messages, you can use chirp msg --title <title> --message <message> --priority <priority>. Since chirp is likely going to be used predominantly to monitor events with success/fail termination statuses, the subcommands chirp success --message <message> and chirp failure --message <message> automatically create titles that indicate success or failure. A priority can also be set; the --priority emergency priority will keep pinging the individual until they acknowledge the notification.

The chirper Bash script is also quite simple, just specify your full command after the chirper settings,

chirper -t "Genome Assembly" -m "big genome assembly"  -- genome_assembly.sh