pynotif

Another Python API for accessing libnotify, along with notification sound support ( with vlc backend ).

Caution : Well you've to go through a rigorous installation prodecure, which may not be a preferred choice always. But it's pretty assured, you'll get to learn something new. 😉

setup

I'll demonstrate installation procedure on Solus Linux.

prerequisites

• Make sure you've gcc, glibc, glibc-devel installed. I'll use gcc 9.3.0.

  $ sudo eopkg it gcc, glibc, glibc-devel
  $ gcc --version # check version

• Python3.x (x>=7) required. For installing Cython, we'll install pip too. I'm using Python3.7.6.

  $ sudo eopkg it python3, python3-devel, pip
  $ python3 --version
  $ python3 -m pip install --user Cython

• Let's install libnotify, libnotify-devel, which will be giving us programmatic interface for talking to libnotify from our C-library.

  $ sudo eopkg it libnotify libnotify-devel

• Well you can send notification from terminal using

  $ notify-send "Summary" "Body of Notification"

• Last but not least vlc, which will be used for playing notification sound, might be helpful for alerting user.

  $ sudo eopkg it vlc vlc-devel

installation

• Let's first go to a convenient location in directory hierarchy of your machine, where you can clone this repo & start working.

  $ git clone https://github.com/itzmeanjan/pynotif.git

• Get into pynotif directory and check content of directories.

  $ cd pynotif
  $ tree -h
  .
  ├── [4.0K]  libnotification
  │   ├── [2.4K]  play_sound.c
  │   ├── [  45]  play_sound.h
  │   ├── [2.4K]  send_notification.c
  │   └── [ 235]  send_notification.h
  ├── [1.0K]  LICENSE
  ├── [4.0K]  pynotif
  │   ├── [1.5K]  pynotif.pyx
  │   └── [1.1K]  setup.py
  ├── [7.0K]  README.md
  ├── [4.0K]  sound
  │   ├── [ 30K]  button_sound.wav
  │   └── [ 29K]  when.mp3
  └── [4.0K]  ss
      └── [ 71K]  screenshot.png
  
  4 directories, 11 files

• First we're going to libnotification, which is going to be compiled into a static C-library. File names are pretty self-explanatory, for what purpose they serve.

  $ cd libnotification
  $ ls
  play_sound.c  play_sound.h  send_notification.c  send_notification.h

• Time to compile each of these C files and generate object code.

  $ gcc -c play_sound.c
  $ gcc -I /usr/include/glib-2.0/ -I /usr/include/gdk-pixbuf-2.0/ -I /usr/lib64/glib-2.0/include/ -c send_notification.c

• Now we need to archive these object files into a static library, which will be invoked from Cython code (*.pyx file).

  $ ar rcs libnotification.a play_sound.o send_notification.o

• As we've obtained static library, compiled object codes can be removed now. You may consider checking kind of generated static library.

  $ rm *.o
  $ file libnotification.a
  libnotification.a: current ar archive

• Now we'll get into pynotif directory, which holds cython code, required for talking to C-library, libnotification.a.

  $ cd ../pynotif
  $ ls
  pynotif.pyx  setup.py

• pynotif.pyx holds cython code for interfacing with libnotification.a, which is to be compiled into equivalent C code ( using Cython compiler ). Then we'll build C extension library ( dynamically linked library ), which can be invoked from Python.

  $ python3 setup.py build_ext --inplace
  Compiling pynotif.pyx because it changed.
  [1/1] Cythonizing pynotif.pyx
  running build_ext
  building 'pynotif' extension
  creating build
  creating build/temp.linux-x86_64-3.7
  x86_64-solus-linux-gcc -pthread -Wno-unused-result -Wsign-compare -DNDEBUG -g -fwrapv -O3 -Wall -mtune=generic -march=x86-64 -g2 -pipe -fPIC -Wformat -Wformat-security -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -fstack-protector-strong --param ssp-buffer-size=32 -fasynchronous-unwind-tables -ftree-vectorize -feliminate-unused-debug-types -Wall -Wno-error -Wp,-D_REENTRANT -fno-semantic-interposition -O3 -falign-functions=32 -I/usr/include -mtune=generic -march=x86-64 -g2 -pipe -fPIC -Wformat -Wformat-security -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -fstack-protector-strong --param ssp-buffer-size=32 -fasynchronous-unwind-tables -ftree-vectorize -feliminate-unused-debug-types -Wall -Wno-error -Wp,-D_REENTRANT -fno-semantic-interposition -O3 -falign-functions=32 -fPIC -I/usr/include/glib-2.0/ -I/usr/include/gdk-pixbuf-2.0/ -I/usr/lib64/glib-2.0/include/ -I../libnotification/ -I/usr/include/python3.7m -c pynotif.c -o build/temp.linux-x86_64-3.7/pynotif.o
  x86_64-solus-linux-gcc -pthread -shared -Wl,--copy-dt-needed-entries -Wl,-O1 -Wl,-z,relro -Wl,-z,now -Wl,-z,max-page-size=0x1000 -Wl,-Bsymbolic-functions -Wl,--sort-common -Wl,--copy-dt-needed-entries -Wl,-O1 -Wl,-z,relro -Wl,-z,now -Wl,-z,max-page-size=0x1000 -Wl,-Bsymbolic-functions -Wl,--sort-common build/temp.linux-x86_64-3.7/pynotif.o -L/usr/lib64/ -L../libnotification/ -L/usr/lib64 -lvlc -lnotify -lnotification -lpython3.7m -o /home/anjan/Documents/my_programs/still_working/open/pynotif/pynotif/pynotif.cpython-37m-x86_64-linux-gnu.so
  
  $ tree -h
  .
  ├── [4.0K]  build
  │   └── [4.0K]  temp.linux-x86_64-3.7
  │       └── [203K]  pynotif.o
  ├── [125K]  pynotif.c
  ├── [146K]  pynotif.cpython-37m-x86_64-linux-gnu.so
  ├── [1.5K]  pynotif.pyx
  └── [1.1K]  setup.py
  
  2 directories, 5 files

• pynotif.*.so is our statically linked shared object, which is of interest. ./build directory & pynotif.c can be deleted. But you might be interested in taking a look at pynotif.c, which is generated C code from pynotif.pyx by Cython compiler.

  $ rm build/ pynotif.c -rv
  $ file pynotif.cpython-*.so # check it out

• Now you can use pynotif, but only from this working directory. Lets check that first.

  $ python3
  >>> import pynotif
  >>> pynotif.__version__
  '0.1.0'
  >>> pynotif.startNotif(b"My Application")
  1
  >>> pynotif.sendNotif(b"Summary", b"Body of Notification", 2, 1, b"/path/to/icon/file", b"/path/to/notification/sound/file")
  1
  >> pynotif.stopNotif()
  >>> help()
  help > pynotif # shows you API documentation
  ...

• But we want to make it available to all scripts installed on this machine, Don't we ? Then we'll install this library into some standard location.

  $ python3 setup.py install --user

• Now go to $HOME directory & invoke Python3 repl prompt.

  $ cd
  $ python3
  >> import pynotif # and it works as expected

• Congratulations, you've successfully built & installed pynotif from C-library. Now use as you wish.

Thanking you 😉