OSX, Growl, And Subversion

Today I found myself trying to figure out how to make a terminal window stay permanent on my desktop or dashboard on OSX, similar to what I've done in the past with Linux. I just wanted to have the terminal window monitoring things in the background for me. Actually, all I wanted to do was keep track of when my local working copy of our Subversion repository was out of sync. I wanted a solution that would keep out of my way, but I also wanted it to be easy.

My search for a solution seemed short-lived when a Google search suggested a dashboard widget for the Terminal application. The problem with it was that the download server was dead or simply blocked by my company's Internet filter. One way or another, it wasn't long before I went in search of another solution.

At that very instant, I received a Growl notification from some program. That's when it dawned on me--I could tell Growl to tell me when my working copy was out of sync. I had done stuff like that in the past, so I set out to write my solution. This is what I came up with:

#!/bin/bash
MY_BOX=[my IP address]
DEV_ROOT='/path/to/svn/working copy'
cd $DEV_ROOT

MY_REV=`svn log --limit 1 | awk '/^r/ {print $1}' | sed 's/[^0-9]//g'`
SVN_REV=`svn log --limit 1 -r HEAD | awk '/^r/ {print $1}' | sed 's/[^0-9]//g'`

if [[ $MY_REV != $SVN_REV ]]; then
    ssh username@$MY_BOX "growlnotify -s -d47111 -n 'iTerm' -t 'Out Of Sync' -m 'Your working copy is out of sync.  Repository is at revision $SVN_REV, and your working copy is at $MY_REV.'"
fi

Now, a little bit about my environment. As I've mentioned before, all of our development really takes place on Linux-powered virtual machines. We simply use our Macs as the system to interact with those virtual machines. That is why there's the ssh line in that script.

Basically, this script just checks the most recent revision in your local working copy. Then it checks the latest revision in the repository itself. It compares the two revision numbers, and if it finds a difference, it will SSH into my OSX box to send me a Growl notification. On the OSX side, I have Growl and growlnotify installed. Here's a summary of the options to growlnotify:

• -s: make the notification sticky--don't hide the notification until the user specifically closes it.
• -d47111: a unique identifier for the notification. This makes it so you can send the same message over and over and it would update any existing notifications with that ID instead of creating a new notification (unless one doesn't exist already).
• -n 'iTerm': I believe this was supposed to be the "source" application. I don't remember right now.
• -t 'Out Of Sync': The title for the notification.
• -m 'Your working copy...': The message to send to my Mac.

This is a fabulous little reminder to me. I have it set up as a cronjob that runs every minute on my Linux-powered development virtual machine. Hopefully this will help others!