notify-atom package

Provides a way for scripts and applications to pass notifications into Atom.

Why would I want this?

The primary intended use is to give your development build system the power to notify the developer that they have a syntax error somewhere. I've seen too many developers having nervous breakdowns over dev scripts not working, when they have a tiny error somewhere that's preventing the automatic builds from generating any working code for them.

How do I use it?

The package starts an http server, listening on port 8090 (configurable) on your machine. This server will react to POST requests in JSON or querystring format that contain the type and message parameters, where type is one of success, info, warning, error, fatalerror and message can be any string.

Here's an example CURL command line you use, to verify that it's working:

curl --data '{"type":"info","message":"It works"}' http://localhost:8090

Then use any way of making an http POST request in your scripts, to make them talk back to you when they need to.

Here's a longer example of a Node.js script you can pipe your stderr to:

const http = require("http");
const readline = require("readline");

function postNotification (type, message, description) {
  const body = JSON.stringify({
    type, message, description,
  });

  const request = http.request({
    url: "http://localhost/",
    port: 8090,
    method: "POST",
    headers: {
      "Content-Type": "application/json",
      "Content-Length": Buffer.byteLength(body),
    },
  });
  request.end(body);
}

function isSassError (line) {
  const lowLine = line.toLocaleLowerCase();
  if (
    lowLine.indexOf("invalid css") !== -1 &&
    lowLine.indexOf("\"formatted\"") !== -1 &&
    lowLine.indexOf("\"formatted\"") < lowLine.indexOf("invalid css")
    ||
    lowLine.indexOf("error") !== -1 &&
    lowLine.indexOf("\"formatted\"") !== -1 &&
    lowLine.indexOf("\"formatted\"") < lowLine.indexOf("error")
  ) {
    return true;
  }

  return false;
}

function parseSassError (line) {
  const lowLine = line.toLocaleLowerCase();
  const lineNum = line.substring(lowLine.indexOf("on line ") +
    "on line ".length, lowLine.indexOf(" ", lowLine.indexOf("on line ") +
      "on line ".length)).trim();
  const sourceFile = line.substring(lowLine.indexOf(" of ",
    lowLine.indexOf("on line ")) + " of ".length, lowLine.indexOf("\\n",
    lowLine.indexOf("on line "))).trim();
  return `Invalid sass syntax on line ${lineNum} of ${sourceFile}`;
}

function isJSError (line) {
  const lowLine = line.toLocaleLowerCase();
  if (
    lowLine.indexOf("syntaxerror") !== -1
  ) {
    return true;
  }

  return false;
}

function parseJSError (line) {
  return line;
}

postNotification("info", "Build system", "Dev runner started");

const rl = readline.createInterface({
  input: process.stdin,
  output: process.stdout,
  terminal: false,
});

rl.on("line", function (line) {
  console.error(line);
  if (isSassError(line)) {
    postNotification("error", "Error compiling sass", parseSassError(line));
  } else if (isJSError(line)) {
    postNotification("error", "Error compiling JavaScript",
      parseJSError(line));
  } else if (line.toLocaleLowerCase().indexOf("error") !== -1) {
    postNotification("error", "Unknown build error", line);
  }
});

Usage (assuming you only care about stderr): mydevrunner.sh 2>&1 >/dev/null | node [error-watching-script.js]