So-notify – A Stack Overflow Question Notifier

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:

• A Beginners Guide To Cron Jobs

Resource:

• So-notify GitHub Repository