Send Mac OS Notifications From R

The data retrieval and computation operations are taking longer and longer as we start cranking through more security data and I’ll often let tasks run in the background whilst performing more mundane tasks or wasting time on Twitter. For folks using RStudio Desktop on a Mac, you can use the #spiffy terminal-notifier from Julien Blanchard (@julienXX) wrapped in a cozy little R function to alert you when your long-running jobs are complete.

After a quick “gem install terminal-notifier” you just need to add this notify() function to your R repertoire:

notify <- function(message="Operation complete") {
  system(sprintf("/usr/bin/terminal-notifier -title 'RStudio' -message '%s' -sender org.rstudio.RStudio -activate org.rstudio.RStudio",
                 message),
         ignore.stdout=TRUE, ignore.stderr=TRUE, wait=FALSE)
}

and add a call to it right after a potentially long-running operation to get a clickable notification right in the Notification Center:

system("sleep 10")
notify("long computation complete")

I’m working on a way to send notifications from RStudio Server when using one of the standalone clients mentioned in a previous post, so stay tuned if you need that functionality as well.