Irssi notifications with notify.io

Ever wanted more powerful notification capabilities inside of irssi?

If you use irssi and you’re like me, you might have a setup similar to this:

  • irssi on home desktop or server inside of a screen session

This is an ideal setup for me since it allows me to shell into my box at home from various locations. A lot of the time the IRC ports are blocked so ssh + screen + irssi gets around that.

One things sorely lacking is message notifications, specifically when your name is mentioned in the channel or when you receive a private message. There are a few plugins that will email you alerts when you’re away but what I was really looking for was growl notifications.

The best service for doing this is something called notify.io. Not only will it forward growl notifications to desktop clients, but you also have the option to send prowl notifications to your iOS devices, jabber, sms, and email.

How irssi + notify.io works

I’ve put together a small irssi script that does just this! notify-io.pl listens for private messages and channel mentions, and forwards them to your notify.io account!

Installation

  1. The first thing you’ll need to do is get an account at notify.io

  2. Download the notify-io.pl script from the github page

  3. Install the script to ~/.irssi/scripts/autorun

  4. Run the command /set notify_io_api_key <key> where <key> is your notify.io api key (retrieved from the settings panel on the notify.io website)

  5. Run the command /set notify_io_email <email> with the notify.io email registered with the account

That’s it! Enjoy.