NotifySend for Ruby

This gem allows you to generate desktop notifications from your Ruby script.

It replicates the functionality of notify-send, but actually bypasses it completely and goes direct to dbus.

Installation

gem install ruby-notify-send

Usage

require 'notify-send'

# With positional parameters (summary, [body], [icon], [timeout]):
NotifySend.send "Long running process just completed"
NotifySend.send "Title", "some extra text"
NotifySend.send "Title", "some extra text", "error" # <--- use the 'error' icon
NotifySend.send "Title", "some extra text", "error", 1000 # See 'Notes'

# With a hash:
NotifySend.send({summary: "Hi", timeout: 2000})
NotifySend.send({summary: "Hi", body: "<b>Hello, World!</b>", icon: "info"})
NotifySend.send summary: "Hello, World!", icon: "notification-audio-volume-off"

Icons

The :icon parameter can be one of:

• 'error', 'info'
• Any of the files in /usr/share/notify-osd/icons/gnome/scalable/status, minus the file extension (if you're on Ubuntu)
• An absolute path to an image file, e.g. {icon: "/home/user_name/Desktop/some_image.jpg", summary: ...}

Notes and known issues

• :timeout seems to be ignored on my desktop.
• If :summary is an empty string, the notification will not be displayed.
• For reference, the: D-BUS notification spec.
• Needs better inputs validation. E.g. D-Bus demands that :timeout must be an Int, but this gem does not enforce that.