So, you’re developing Ruby on Rails apps on your shiny Mac and you want to get Growl notifications when your rake tasks are complete. Below, I will illustrate a fairly simple way to get Growl notifications when the test_units and test_functional tasks are complete. This method can be easily extended to any of the other tasks as well.

Prerequisites

• Growl is installed and running.
• The RubyCocoa framework is installed.
• You also need a copy of the Ruby binding from the Growl source distribution. Go to the Growl Developer Downloads page and download the latest tarball or bzball. Extract the files and grab a copy of Growl.rb from the Bindings/ruby directory.

Integration with Rails

First, copy the Growl.rb file that you extracted from the Growl source into your Rails application’s lib directory. Name it growl.rb (all lowercase).

Next, create a new file called growl_notifications.rake in your Rails application’s lib/tasks directory. Copy and paste the following code into this file:

task :test_units do
  task_notifier 'Rake Task', 'Unit testing has completed.'
end

task :test_functional do |t|
  task_notifier 'Rake Task', 'Functional testing has completed.'
end

def task_notifier(title, message)
  begin
    require 'growl'
    n = GrowlNotifier.new('Rake',['RakeTask'],nil)
    n.register()
    n.notify('RakeTask', title, message)
  rescue
  end
end

Growl’s Ruby bindings allow you, among other things, to customize the icon that is displayed in the notification. Take a peek inside the growl.rb file for details.

I would like to extend this further to show the results from the tests in the notification message body. The results are part of a TestResult object, but I’m not sure if there is a way to get at this object by the time I create the notification. If you how I can do this, please let me know!