HipCat

Pipe things to HipChat from the command-line!

Inspired by Slackcat!

Installation

You will need a working installation of Python 3 (you probably already have this if you're on Linux or OSX) and PIP.

pip3 install hipcat

Go to https://www.hipchat.com/account/api and create a new token. It only needs the 'Send Message' scope, but this may change in future.

Create a file at ~/.hipcat.ini that looks a bit like this:

[hipchat]
access_token = <put-your-token here>

Using hipcat

You can get help by running hipcat --help, but the basics look like this:

# Pipe output from one command to HipChat:
echo 'This is my message' | hipcat 'Room Name'

If you don't want to pass the message via a pipe, you can instead provide it as a parameter:

# Run a long running command and then notify on HipChat
my-long-task && hipcat 'Notifications' -m "The long-running task is done"

If the text you are sending to HipChat is formatted, use the -q flag to prefix with /quote, and if it should be syntax-highlighted code, use the -c flag to prefix with /code.

You can send a direct message by using the 'mention name' of a user instead of a room name:

echo "You are great" | hipcat '@FriendlyDave'

Notifications

The message you are sending may also be treated as a room notification via the --notification flag. The following additional options and flags are then recognized by hipcat:

• --color to specify background color for the message. Valid values: yellow, green, red, purple, gray, random. Defaults to yellow.
• --sender to specify a label to be shown in addition to the sender's name. Defaults to hipcat if --notify (see below) is specified as well.
• --notify to ensure this message triggers a user notification.

# Send a message "Message" with a purple background, from "BOT" and with a
# user notification:
hipcat 'Notifications' --notification --notify -m "Message" --color=purple --sender="BOT"

Contributing to hipcat

You want to contribute? Love you!

There's some stuff you should know:

• Please don't backport it to Python 2. Yes, I know it's easy. We should all be writing Python 3 now.
• Please treat other contributors and commenters with respect.
• Please ensure that any changes follow PEP-8.
• When I add tests (there aren't any yet!) I plan to use py.test. If you want to help by addind tests, let's talk about it first.

To Do

• Add a flag to send the output to HipChat line-by-line rather than at the end.
• Allow uploading content as a file rather than inline text.
• Err... post a GitHub issue if you want to see a new feature, and we'll talk!