System notifications for Maven on Ubuntu

Builds can be slow and sloppy. If your job involves executing maven builds frequently during your work - and if you are a java developer than most probably you do so - then you spend significant time on waiting for build jobs.

Of curse we usually don’t just stare at the console, waiting for the maven build to finish, at least because the log messages flooding on the screen just harmful for the eyes. Instead we something else in an other window.

During those (hopefully) short build periods I don’t like periodically checking if the build has finished yet, but I want to know exactly when it is done. To let myself get notified about it I created a simple wrapper on the top of the mvn command which just pops up a unity system notification on ubuntu after the build. I have been using this utility for years, maybe it will be useful for others too.

So I put a the script below to ~/bin/mvn and I made sure that ~/bin/ precedes the maven installation directory on the $PATH (referred as $MVN_HOME/bin in the script):

#!/bin/bash

args="$*"
$MVN_HOME/bin/mvn $*
let x=$?
if [[ $x -eq 0 ]]; then
    notify-send --urgency=normal -i "face-laugh" "mvn $args success"
else
    notify-send --urgency=normal -i "error" "mvn $args failure"
fi

exit $x

This wrapper script runs the real mvn executable then displays a success or error notification depending on maven’s exit code, in the top-right corner of the screen. They look like this:

The same trick will probably work for any build tools, since all you need is a command to be wrapped.

Jan 24, 2017