deno_notify

Send desktop notifications on all platforms in Deno.
Supports Windows, macOS, and linux using notify-rust though some features are platform-specific.

Note: More features are in the works and the API may change as a result.

Usage

The mod.ts entrypoint uses Plug internally so you don't have to download or open the plugin manually.

You will need to run using the --unstable and --allow-all permissions to allow for automatic plugin loading and caching.

import { Notification } from "https://deno.land/x/[email protected]/ts/mod.ts";

// Create a new notification
const notif = new Notification();

// Add a simple message
notif.title("My message");

// Display it
notif.show();

Or stack together your desired options:

new Notification({ macos: true })
  .title("My message")
  .subtitle("It's very important...")
  .body("Hello, World!")
  .soundName("Basso")
  .show();

Documentation

Check out the Documentation for a list of available features.

Platform-Specific Features

By default, only cross-platform features are available. In order to enable platform-specific features (e.g. icons), you can pass in booleans flags to specify the supported platforms in the Notification's constructor.

// Enable linux-specific-features
const notif = new Notification({ linux: true });

// Notification.icon() is now available
notif.icon("/path/to/icon");

Specifying platforms may also provide different documentation and typings for the Notification API.

For example, macOS has specific sound names that are available for Notifications; these are reflected in the macOS-specific Notification API.

Strict Platform Checking

The second parameter of the Notification's constructor can be used to determine whether the platform-features should be checked at runtime. When true (default), any platform-specific feature will error if used on a platform that does not support it. When false, the error will be silently ignored.

Note: Platform checking is performed both at compile time (TypeScript) and at runtime.

// Icons are not supported on macOS
// If notif.icon() is called on a macOS computer, this will error.
const notif = new Notification({ linux: true }, true);
notif.icon("/path/to/icon");

// This will not error; however, no icon will be displayed on macOS.
const notif = new Notification({ linux: true }, false);
notif.icon("/path/to/icon");

FAQ

Error: Deno.dlopen is not a function

If you are getting the error "Deno.dlopen is not a function" then you likely haven't enabled the unstable ffi features when running your code. Please run with the --unstable flag. (You might also need the --allow-ffi flag).

Reason

This library relies on native (Rust) libraries to launch notifications. However, Deno hasn't yet stabilized foreign function interfaces (which allow Deno to call these native libraries). To allow running these unstable features, you must explictly tell Deno to allow calls to the unstable Deno.dlopen function.

Installing Manually

By default, the ffi library will automatically be downloaded via Plug to match your deno_notify version.

However, in some cases you may want to refer to a local version of the library files. To do so, you can set the environment variable NOTIFY_PLUGIN_URL to the path of the library file(s).

You can set the environment variable via command line, or directly through Deno via Deno.env.set(). (Note that you must import deno_notify after having set the environment variable for this option to take effect).

Known Issues

• Many platform-specific features are not implemented
  • Features like actions, hints, etc.
  • Need to integrate new mac-notification-sys changes into notify-rust
• Icons/app_id on macOS are not implemented because of following issues:
  • Custom app icons are only applied if the notification requesting it is the first one being sent on mac
    • This means an app icon cannot be changed once set, and cannot be changed even if it wasn't set in the first one.
  • Using a custom app icon on mac sometimes crashes
    • From my own experience, this seems to happen with non-system applications
    • See this GitHub issue for more information

Contributing

Pull request, issues and feedback are very welcome. Code style is formatted using deno fmt -c deno.jsonc. When adding new features, please also add tests in the tests directory.

Acknowledgments

• Notification system from notify-rust
• Plugin import from Plug