Stack Overflow needs no introduction. It is one of the largest Q&A portal site for Programmers to learn, search and post questions and get answers from millions of users around the world. A while ago, we published a guide that described how to search and browse Stack Overflow website from command line. Today, we are going to discuss yet another command line application named "so-notify" that sends a notification to the user's system when a new question is posted on Stack Overflow website. So-notify, the Stack Overflow Question notifier, is a tiny CLI application (97k) written in PHP. The source code is freely available on GitHub, so you can fork it, improve the code or fix bugs if there any.
So-notify – A Stack Overflow Question Notifier
Installing so-notify
Installation is incredibly easy! I tested it on my Arch Linux system. It worked well!
First make sure you have installed php and php-sqlite packages. These two packages are available in the official repositories of most Linux distributions. On Arch Linux and derivatives, you can install them like below.
$ sudo pacman -S php php-sqlite
After installing the prerequisites, enable pdo sqlite extension for your php.
To do so, edit /etc/php/php.ini file:
$ sudo vi /etc/php/php.ini
Find and uncomment the following line:
extension=pdo_sqlite
Hit ESC key and type :wq to save and close the file.
Now, download the latest version of so-notify from the project's releases page.
$ wget https://github.com/SapneshNaik/so-notify--A_Stack_Overflow_Question_Notifier/files/1586849/so-notify.gz
Extract the downloaded archive:
$ gzip -d ./so-notify.gz
Then copy it to your /usr/local/bin/ folder:
$ sudo mv ./so-notify /usr/local/bin
Finally, make it executable:
$ chmod u+x /usr/local/bin/./so-notify
Done! Now it is time to see how it works.
Usage
If you run 'so-notify' without any arguments, you will see the list of available commands and general options.
$ so-notify
Before running it, you need to subscribe to one or more tags of your choice. Let me subscribe to some tags, for example linux and python.
$ so-notify tag:add linux
$ so-notify tag:add python
You can subscribe to as many as tags you want. To list all subscribed tags, run:
$ so-notify tag:show
Sample output would be:
Once subscribed, run so-notify for questions:
$ so-notify run
Just click on any question to view it in your default web browser.
To unsubscribe from any subscribed tag, use tag_id like below:
$ so-notify tag:remove 2
You can view the tag ids by listing the subscribed tags.
$ so-notify tag:show
You don't have to manually check for questions every time. Setup a cronjob to check for new questions every X minute(s).
To do so, run:
$ crontab -e
Add the following line to check for new questions every minute.
* * * * * /usr/local/bin/so-notify run
Save and quit the file. Start or restart cron service to take effect the changes.
$ sudo service cron start
Suggested read:
Resource:
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2 comments
Thank You. It is awesome that you are wrote about my project and I would appreciate if you could add the Product Page link to the resources section. It is https://www.kerneldev.com/2017/12/27/so-notify-a-stack-overflow-question-notifier/
Linked the project’s page. Cheers!