ding!

By  on  

I've been working with beefy virtual machines, docker containers, and build processes lately.  Believe it or not, working on projects aimed at making Mozilla developers more productive can mean executing code that can take anywhere from a minute to an hour, which in itself can hit how productive I can be.  For the longer tasks, I often get away from my desk, make a cup of coffee, and check in to see how the rest of the Walsh clan is doing.

When I walk away, however, it would be nice to know when the task is done, so I can jet back to my desk and get back to work.  My awesome Mozilla colleague Byron "glob" Jones recently showed me his script for task completion notification and I forced him to put it up on GitHub so you all can get it too;  it's called ding!

Once you have ding, you can do cools stuff like:

# ding somecommand
ding docker-machine start default
ding ./start-local-environment
ding ./refresh-environment

If the task completes successfully, you'll hear a positive sound; if the command fails, you'll hear a more negative sound -- a simple, yet useful and meaningful detail.

There's not much to explain except that ding is awesome and should check it out!

Recent Features

  • By
    39 Shirts – Leaving Mozilla

    In 2001 I had just graduated from a small town high school and headed off to a small town college. I found myself in the quaint computer lab where the substandard computers featured two browsers: Internet Explorer and Mozilla. It was this lab where I fell...

  • By
    Responsive Images: The Ultimate Guide

    Chances are that any Web designers using our Ghostlab browser testing app, which allows seamless testing across all devices simultaneously, will have worked with responsive design in some shape or form. And as today's websites and devices become ever more varied, a plethora of responsive images...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Create a Dynamic Flickr Image Search with the Dojo Toolkit

    The Dojo Toolkit is a treasure chest of great JavaScript classes.  You can find basic JavaScript functionality classes for AJAX, node manipulation, animations, and the like within Dojo.  You can find elegant, functional UI widgets like DropDown Menus, tabbed interfaces, and form element replacements within...

  • By
    Build a Calendar Using PHP, XHTML, and CSS

    One of the website features my customers love to provider their web users is an online dynamic calendar. An online calendar can be used for events, upcoming product specials, memos, and anything else you can think of. I've taken some time to completely...

Discussion

  1. I wonder if an even better solution would be to use macOS’s “say” command since this is macOS specific script and “say” is always available. That way you wouldn’t have the requirement of keeping those two .mp3 files in the directory as the script.

    It’d be awesome if he made this brew installable as well :)

  2. Scott Rippey

    What a great idea! I’ve been using the say command as an audible indicator when my Docker builds finish, but this is way more convenient, and even reports errors!
    So here’s an alternative, which I put in my .bash_profile, and has no dependencies (other than macOS):

    ding() {
    	EXIT_CODE=$?
    	if [ $# -gt 0 ]; then
    		time $@
    		EXIT_CODE=$?
    	fi
    	if [ $EXIT_CODE = 0 ]; then
    		say Hooray
    	else
    		say We\'ve had a problem
    	fi
    }
    
    

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!