How can I trigger a Notification Center notification from an AppleScript or shell script?

Question

I'd love to be able to take advantage of 10.8's Notification Center features in AppleScripts and shell scripts I write.

Is there a built-in command or a third-party library I can use from either an AppleScript or shell script?

Ideally the type and icon of the notification could be controlled, but even just the ability to trigger a basic banner with a stock icon (but custom text) would be appreciated.

Answer 1

With Mavericks and later, you can do this using AppleScript's 'display notification':

display notification "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet" with title "Title"

                          

That's it—literally that simple! No 3^rd-party libraries or apps required and is completely portable for use on other systems. 10.9 notification on the top, 10.10 DP in the middle, 10.10 on the bottom.

AppleScript can be run from the shell using /usr/bin/osascript:

osascript -e 'display notification "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet" with title "Title"'

You can also customise the alert further by adding…

• a subtitle

  Append 'subtitle' followed by the string or variable containing the subtitle.

  display notification "message" with title "title" subtitle "subtitle"
  

  The above example produces the following notification:

  

• sound

  Append 'sound name' followed by the name of a sound that will be played along with the notification.

  display notification "message" sound name "Sound Name"
  

  Valid sound names are the names of sounds located in…

  • ~/Library/Sounds
  • /System/Library/Sounds

---

Posting notifications can be wrapped as a command-line script. The following code can be run in Terminal and will add a script to /usr/local/bin (must exist, add to $PATH) called notify.

cd /usr/local/bin && echo -e "#!/bin/bash\n/usr/bin/osascript -e \"display notification \\\"\$*\\\"\"" > notify && chmod +x notify;cd -

This is the script that the above will add to notify.

#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/osascript -e "display notification \"$*\""

Now to display a notification:

notify Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
sleep 5; notify Slow command finished

Answer 2

terminal-notifier

From the README:

terminal-notifier is a command-line tool to send Mac OS X User Notifications, which are available in Mac OS X 10.8.

It is currently packaged as an application bundle, because NSUserNotification does not work from a ‘Foundation tool’. radar://11956694

This tool will be used by Kicker to show the status of commands which are executed due to filesystem changes. (v3.0.0)

Download

Prebuilt binaries, which are code-signed and ready to use, are available from the downloads section.

Usage

$ ./terminal-notifier.app/Contents/MacOS/terminal-notifier group-ID sender-name message [bundle-ID]

In order to use terminal-notifier, you have to call the binary inside the app bundle.

The first argument specifies the ‘group’ a notification belongs to. For any ‘group’ only one notification will ever be shown, replacing previously posted notifications. Examples are: the sender’s process ID to scope the notifications by a unique process, or the current working directory to scope notifications by a project.

The second and third arguments describe the notification itself and are its ‘title’ and ‘message’ respectively. For example, to communicate the sender of a notification to the user, you could specify the sender’s name as the title.

The fourth and last argument is an optional one. It specifies which application should be activated when the user clicks the notification. By default this will activate Terminal.app, to launch another application instead specify the application’s bundle identifier. For example, to launch Safari.app use: com.apple.Safari.

Answer 3

I just want to add a note to @grgarside's answer, because I know many people want to have a notification popup that can only be dismissed by button click.

I have found the solution for you:

It was actually controlled by a setting in System Preference, rather than some parameter in the script written. These two images should explain it all

Thanks @grgarside for the great answer.

Answer 4

You can now do this with Growl2 (available from the App Store). Install Growl and enable "OS X Notifications" (screenshot)

Additionally, you'll need to install GrowlNotify for a command-line tool to send Growl notifications. You can download this tool for free on the Download page.

You can now generate Growl notifications from the command line, which will be forwarded to the Notification Center. For example:

growlnotify -n "My App" -m "Hello world"

Note that it currently doesn't seem possible to change the application icon.

Answer 5

I recently forked terminal-notifier to build a command line tool to display notification Alerts (with actions) and Reply Type Alerts.

I use it with my shell scripts and golang apps to get interactive answers from users.

https://github.com/vjeantet/alerter

Answer 6

@grgarside's solution is nice, but it is vulnerable to script injection, which can be a major security issue when this is used to e.g. display log file contents or something similar.

This should be safer:

#!/bin/bash
X="$*" /usr/bin/osascript -e 'display notification system attribute "X"'

Answer 7

(This is an alternative implementation based on @grgarside's excellent answer.)

AppleScript can be interpreted directly by putting osascript in the shebang line.

#!/usr/bin/osascript

on run argv
    if length of argv = 1 then
        display notification (item 1 of argv) with title "Notification"
    else if length of argv > 1 then
        display notification (item 1 of argv) with title (item 2 of argv)
    else
        return "<message> is required\nUsage: notify <message> [<title>]"
    end if
end run

Save this as notify somewhere in your path, e.g., /usr/local/bin/notify, and make it executable (chmod +x notify). It accepts a message and an optional title. If either has whitespace, wrap it in quotes so the shell interprets it as a single argument.

$ notify "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet" "Testing Notifications"

Answer 8

Since Growl is not free, and terminal-notifier is not available on pre-10.8 systems, I tend to use cocoaDialog. It is free and open source, so you can probably also distribute along with your scripts.

If you don't need a lot of customization, you can also use AppleScript's display notification which you can also call from the shell as others have already mentioned.

But beware that AppleScript seems to require double-quotes. So if you need variables, this will not work:

osascript -e "display notification '$text' with title '$title'" #WRONG

You will have to use escaped double-quotes. This is ugly but works:

osascript -e "display notification \"$text\" with title \"$title\""

Answer 9

Here's a cool one that I use in a ruby script on OS X (so that I can start a script and get an update even after toggling away from the window):

cmd = %Q|osascript -e 'display notification "Server was reset" with title "Posted Update"'|
system ( cmd )

Answer 10

An alternative:

In .bash_profile:

function _sys_notify() {
    local notification_command="display notification \"$2\" with title \"$1\""
    osascript -e "$notification_command"
}
alias sys-notify="_sys_notify $1 $2"

Use command: sys-notify "title" "message"

Answer 11

Thank you, this was just what I needed for some user scripts. I made a slight modification to add a subtitle and sound. If a value is not provided, it is ignored.

function _sys_notify() {
local notification_command="display notification \"$2\" with title \"$1\" subtitle \"$3\" sound name \"$4\""
osascript -e "$notification_command"
}

alias sys-notify="_sys_notify $1 $2 $3 $4"

For the sound, use a sound filename without the extension from /System/Library/Sounds. For example, to use the file Ping.aiff, use Ping for $4

Answer 12

Official documentation

https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/LanguagesUtilities/Conceptual/MacAutomationScriptingGuide/DisplayNotifications.html

Copying the text here, in case the document is moved or removed.

To show a notification, provide the display notification command with a string to display. Optionally, provide values for the with title, subtitle, and sound name parameters to provide additional information and an audible alert when the notification appears

display notification "All graphics have been converted." with title "My Graphic Processing Script" subtitle "Processing is complete." sound name "Frog"

NOTE

After using a script to display a notification, the script or Script Editor (if the script is run from within Script Editor) is added to the list of notifying apps in System Preferences > Notifications. There, you can configure options, such as whether to display notifications as alerts or banners.

Clicking the Show button in an alert-style notification opens the app that displayed the notification. For a script app, the action of opening the app again triggers the run handler of the script, potentially causing the script to begin processing a second time. Keep this in mind, and add code to your script to handle this scenario, if appropriate.

Answer 13

If you want sticky notifications (Vic Jang's comment seems to no longer work, at least in Big Sur), here's a kind of way, use dialog instead of notification:

osascript -e 'display dialog "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet" with title "Title"'

So you could do one display notification then follow it up with the dialog.

Also alerter does sticky.

$ brew install alerter
$ alerter -message "hi"