Chef Report Handler for Growl

A few weeks ago, I listened to the Changelog Podcast episode featuring Chris Forsythe, lead of the Growl project. I actually don’t^Wdidn’t use Growl for a long time, because I really disliked notifications of any kind, as they are distracting. However, I do appreciate the project, and supporting them by purchasing Growl on the App Store seemed totally reasonable.

Of course, buying the app means it was installed on the spot. I always resisted it in the past because it was bundled with so many apps, but I don’t want unsolicited software to show up on my computer. Now, it seemed a bit more natural, and I made a few configuration tweaks (I should put those into Chef…). I’m actually happy to use it now, especially since it has a nice network accessible API.

Growlnotify

Shortly after I started using Growl on my work system, I looked into ways I could get notifications fired off from the command-line after long running processes finished. In particular, I wanted to get a notification that knife ec2 server create was done. I found the growlnotify program, which is available via homebrew. This is quite a nifty tool, and I set it to use immediately, doing things like this:

knife ec2 server create \
  -f m1.small -I $lucid_small -x ubuntu \
  -r 'role[base],role[webserver]' && \
growlnotify -m "Finished launching 1 instance" || \
growlnotify -m "failed to launch instance"

I could kick off the server creation, switch focus to another workspace, and then know via growl if the instance was created.

Chef Handler

As many know, I manage my workstations with Chef. Chef has a pretty cool exception and report handler API that has a lot of flexibility. I thought it would be fun to throw together a simple report handler that would send a growl notification after a Chef run. In this case, it will report the elapsed time of the run if it was successful, or report an exception if it failed.

Using the handler is pretty straightforward. Install the chef-handler-growl Gem, then configure chef-client (or solo).

require "chef/handler/growl"
report_handlers << Chef::Handler::Growl.new
exception_handlers << Chef::Handler::Growl.new

Then run Chef, and see something like this:

The handler is available as a RubyGem. You can also view the source. I created issues on the GitHub project for the two items on the roadmap, too.