Growl notifications from Ruby on OS X

July 6, 2010

I wanted to generate Growl notifications from a Ruby script on OSX and had a bit of trouble getting it to work. To save you the same hassle, here's the steps I took:

Install growl

Install Growl if you haven't already. I used version 1.2.

Set some growl preferences

In the growl preference plane (find it under System Preferences)

under network check "Listen for incoming notifications" and "Allow remote application registration"
restart growl

Install the ruby-growl gem

There's a couple of different ruby bindings for Growl but ruby-growl seemed to work for me

gem install ruby-growl

Send a growl notification from your Ruby script

You can now send notifications from Ruby

require 'rubygems'
require 'ruby-growl'

g = Growl.new "127.0.0.1", "ruby-growl", ["ruby-growl Notification"]

g.notify "ruby-growl Notification", "It Came From Ruby-Growl", "Greetings!"