terminal-notifier

terminal-notifier is a command-line tool to send macOS User Notifications, which are available on macOS 10.10 and higher.

News

alerter features were merged in terminal-notifier 1.7. This led to some issues and even more issues in the 1.8 release. We decided with Valère Jeantet to rollback this merge.

From now on terminal-notifier won't have the sticky notification feature nor the actions buttons. If you need them please use alerter. I also want to follow semver hence this latest version starts at 2.0.0.

Sticking to two smaller specialized tools will hopefully make them easier to maintain and less error prone.

Caveats

It is currently packaged as an application bundle, because NSUserNotification does not work from a ‘Foundation tool’. radar://11956694
If you intend to package terminal-notifier with your app to distribute it on the Mac App Store, please use 1.5.2; version 1.6.0+ uses a private method override, which is not allowed in the App Store Guidelines.
If you're using macOS < 10.10 you should use terminal-notifier 1.6.3.
If you're looking for sticky notifications or more actions on a notification please use alerter

Download

Prebuilt binaries are available from the releases section.

Or if you want to use this from Ruby, you can install it through RubyGems:

$ [sudo] gem install terminal-notifier

You can also install it via Homebrew:

$ brew install terminal-notifier

Usage

$ ./terminal-notifier.app/Contents/MacOS/terminal-notifier -[message|group|list] [VALUE|ID|ID] [options]

In order to use terminal-notifier, you have to call the binary inside the application bundle.

The Ruby gem, which wraps this tool, does have a bin wrapper. If installed you can simply do:

$ terminal-notifier -[message|group|list] [VALUE|ID|ID] [options]

This will obviously be a bit slower than using the tool without the wrapper.

If you'd like notifications to stay on the screen until dismissed, go to System Preferences -> Notifications -> terminal-notifier and change the style from Banners to Alerts. You cannot do this on a per-notification basis.

Example Uses

Display piped data with a sound:

$ echo 'Piped Message Data!' | terminal-notifier -sound default

Use a custom icon:

$ terminal-notifier -title ProjectX -subtitle "new tag detected" -message "Finished" -appIcon http://vjeantet.fr/images/logo.png

Open an URL when the notification is clicked:

$ terminal-notifier -title '💰' -message 'Check your Apple stock!' -open 'http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=AAPL'

Open an app when the notification is clicked:

$ terminal-notifier -group 'address-book-sync' -title 'Address Book Sync' -subtitle 'Finished' -message 'Imported 42 contacts.' -activate 'com.apple.AddressBook'

Options

At a minimum, you must specify either the -message , the -remove, or the -list option.

-message VALUE [required]

The message body of the notification.

If you pipe data into terminal-notifier, you can omit this option, and the piped data will become the message body instead.

-title VALUE

The title of the notification. This defaults to ‘Terminal’.

-subtitle VALUE

The subtitle of the notification.

-sound NAME

Play the NAME sound when the notification appears. Sound names are listed in /System/Library/Sounds.

Use the special NAME “default” for the default notification sound.

-group ID

Specifies the notification’s ‘group’. For any ‘group’, only one notification will ever be shown, replacing previously posted notifications.

A notification can be explicitly removed with the -remove option (see below).

Example group IDs:

The sender’s name (to scope the notifications by tool).
The sender’s process ID (to scope the notifications by a unique process).
The current working directory (to scope notifications by project).

-remove ID [required]

Remove a previous notification from the ID ‘group’, if one exists.

Use the special ID “ALL” to remove all messages.

-list ID [required]

Lists details about the specified ‘group’ ID.

Use the special ID “ALL” to list details about all currently active messages.

The output of this command is tab-separated, which makes it easy to parse.

-activate ID

Activate the application specified by ID when the user clicks the notification.

You can find the bundle identifier (CFBundleIdentifier) of an application in its Info.plist file inside the application bundle.

Examples application IDs are:

com.apple.Terminal to activate Terminal.app
com.apple.Safari to activate Safari.app

-sender ID

Fakes the sender application of the notification. This uses the specified application’s icon, and will launch it when the notification is clicked.

Using this option fakes the sender application, so that the notification system will launch that application when the notification is clicked. Because of this it is important to note that you cannot combine this with options like -execute and -activate which depend on the sender of the notification to be ‘terminal-notifier’ to perform its work.

For information on the ID, see the -activate option.

-appIcon PATH

Specify an image PATH to display instead of the application icon.

WARNING: This option is subject to change, since it relies on a private method.

-contentImage PATH

Specify an image PATH to attach inside of the notification.

WARNING: This option is subject to change since it relies on a private method.

-open URL

Open URL when the user clicks the notification. This can be a web or file URL, or any custom URL scheme.

-execute COMMAND

Run the shell command COMMAND when the user clicks the notification.

-ignoreDnD

Ignore Do Not Disturb settings and unconditionally show the notification.

WARNING: This option is subject to change since it relies on a private method.

License

All the works are available under the MIT license. Except for ‘Terminal.icns’, which is a copy of Apple’s Terminal.app icon and as such is copyright of Apple.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

julienXX/terminal-notifier