Make your buildserver talk

Have you ever started a shell script which takes a while and you keep monitoring that window because you really need those results? If you are working on a Mac, you can use the Mac’s power of speech to tell you a command is finished. Here’s how:

./yourreallyslowbuild.sh; say "really long build is finished"

With a little curl and shell scripting magic, I told my Mac to constantly monitor our Jenkins buildserver, and bug everybody in the office when the hourly build is failing:

#!/bin/sh

# Configuration
jenkinsurl=http://my.jenkins.server/jenkins
voice=Vicki

# The function that does the trick
fnReportFailure() {
  job=${1}
  message=${2}
  result=`curl -s \
    ${jenkinsurl}/job/${job}/lastBuild/api/xml?xpath=/*/result/text()`

  if  [ "${result}" == "XPath /*/result didn't match" ] \
   || [ "${result}" == "ABORTED" ]; then
    # ignore aborted or in-progress build. Ignore.
    return 0
  elif [ "${result}" != "SUCCESS" ]; then
    echo `date` ${job} : ${result}
    say -v "${voice}" "${message}"
  fi
}

# Loop over all projects and shout out problems
clear
echo
echo "Monitoring ${jenkinsurl}"
echo
printf "===== "

while [ true ]; do
  # Add as many jobs as you want here:
  fnReportFailure "hourly_java_job" "The hourly java job is unstable."
  fnReportFailure "hourly_deploy_job" "The hourly deploy failed."

  # Tell the time and sleep a little
  now=`date +%H:%M:%S`
  printf "\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b${now} "
  sleep 60
done

This script talks with the “Vicky” voice, because I let “Alex” read my iChat messages to me. Of course, the “Bad News” and “Zarvox” voices may be even more “motivating” to quickly fix the build. Now go and keep your eyes on youtube… err I mean your code.

Enjoy.