desktop-notifications
v0.2.4
Published
A simple and opinionated library for handling Windows notifications
Downloads
1,000
Readme
desktop-notifications
A simple and opinionated library for working with OS notifications
Goals
- zero dependencies
- good support for Windows notifications
- leverage TypeScript declarations wherever possible
Note: This is currently in preview, with support for features that GitHub Desktop uses.
Install
$ npm install --save desktop-notifications
# or
$ yarn add desktop-notifications
But Why?
The current set of options for interacting with notifications, especially on Windows, have some limitations that meant we couldn't use them easily in GitHub Desktop:
electron
doesn't support Windows notifications when those are hidden away in the Action Center, because it doesn't have a COM activator that could leverage CLSID-based activation. More details about this can be found in electron/electron#29461.node-notifier
relies onsnoretoast
to handle notifications on Windows, and the way it's used is only able to detect one event with each notification, and also requires the app to use the same CLSID that is hardcoded in snoretoast.electron-windows-notifications
has many dependencies aroundNodeRT
which, as of today, also require some manual steps in order to build them.
After exploring all these options, we decided to write our own library to do the stuff we require using no dependencies at all and having all the features we need.
Building and running the sample app
In order to get the sample app up and running you need to:
- Build
desktop-notifications
. - Build the sample app.
- (macOS only) Sign the Electron binary, so that macOS will allow the sample app to display notifications.
- Start the sample app.
These are the commands to make that happen:
$ yarn install
$ yarn build
$ cd sample-app
$ yarn install
$ yarn build
$ /usr/bin/codesign --deep --force --sign - --timestamp\=none node_modules/electron/dist/Electron.app/Contents/MacOS/Electron # macOS only
$ yarn start
Documentation
See the documentation under the
docs
folder.
Supported versions
Each release of desktop-notifications
includes prebuilt binaries based on
N-API, with support for different versions
of Node and Electron. Please refer to the
N-API version matrix
and the release documentation for Node and
Electron to see what is
supported currently.
Contributing
Read the Setup section to ensure your development environment is setup for what you need.
This project isn't about implementing a 1-1 replication of any other notifications API, but implementing just enough for whatever usage GitHub Desktop needs.
If you want to see something supported, open an issue to start a discussion about it.