Introducing Git-Notifier

This evening I finished the preliminary base code for a project I have been working on called Git-Notifier.  Inspired by Gitifer for OSX, Git-Notifier provides pop-up notifications for updates of a remote git repository using libnotify in Ubuntu.

As it stands, the program is currently a bash script, and configuration is a manual process.

To get started, download the come from http://github.com/maxolasersquad/Git-Notifier/archives/v0.1 in either tar.gz or .zip format.  Extract the .gitnotifier folder to your home directory.  Extract the gitnotify.sh file to wherever you would like to execute it from.  I keep this file in my home directory as well.

Next cd into the ~/.gitnotify directory and clone the remote repository using the -n switch.  For example, to get notified of updates to the Git-Notifier application, do the following

cd ~/.gitnotify

git clone -n git://github.com/maxolasersquad/Git-Notifier.git

Finally, edit the file ~/.gitnotify/gitnotify.ini file.  To the right of repos=, list out each git project you have cloned.  Using the same example from above, the line would look like this.

repos=Git-Notifier

If you have cloned any more repositories, simply list them all in the repos line, separated by a space.

Finally you can change how often the program looks for updates, and the pretty style to display the results. To see the different options for the pretty styel, run man git show.

Once you have cloned the directories you want, with the -n switch, and you have configured the ini file appropriately, simply run the gitnotify.sh script.  As commits are made to the remote repository, you should get notifications on your deskop.

The code could probably use some love, and a few more features would be nice as well.  Once I am happy with how this script works, I'd like to port it over to python.  I'd also like to have better support for non-Ubuntu flavors of Linux, though I'm not sure what other notifications are out there that can be easily programmed from Bash.

Any bugs, fixes, improvements, etc. would be appreciated on the github site.