Hacking Prowl and Irssi
The moment I stumbled upon Prowl (a new iPhone App that routes Growl notifications to your iPhone via Apple’s push service) I knew I would find some powerful uses for it.
At Tera-Byte, several of my colleagues telecommute. In order to stay in constant communication with each other, we all use good ol’ IRC. In order to be readily available and allow quick roaming from one location to an other, I use Irssi’s proxy module which runs continuously within a screen session on my co-located server.
On my Desktops and iPhone I run Colloquy which connects to my Irssi proxy. Although push capabilities are planned for Colloquy, it’s not ready yet. Prowl appeared to be the perfect band-aid for the situation.
My original plan was to use Prowl as intended and have Colloquy’s Growl notifications directed to my iPhone. This had some limitations, most importantly it required leaving Colloquy running on my work desktop.
Fortunately the developer of Prowl provided an example perl script to push notifications to Prowl independently of Growl. I’ve never attempted to work with Irssi script’s, but it appeared I had all the required pieces to build something clever.
I downloaded BCOW’s awayproxy.pl script as a starting point and began to hack away at it. The result: prowlnotify.pl.
Change the prowluser and prowlpass lines then load this script into Irssi. While you’re connected to your proxy the script will do nothing. When your last IRC client disconnects it will push all subsequent public messages containing your nick as well as private messages to your iPhone via Prowl. How sweet it is!
Of course, this post would not be complete without an obligatory screenshot. Nobody appeared to have anything to say today, so I was down and out. In my desperation I called upon cshaiku to grace me with his words of wisdom:
Update: I have now updated this script to use the new Prowl apikeys. Editing the script is no longer required. Simply copy your Prowl key into ~/.prowlkey.
July 8th, 2009 at 12:14 am
Seriously? You had to tell the world about our little secret!?
I’m taking the kids. You can have the duckie. He always loved you anyways.
*sniff*
July 16th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
Just wanted to drop you two lines:
(1) Thank you for this script. Just testing it out not 5 minutes ago and worked like a charm.
Using this script and screen_away, I have a perfect combination of notification.
(2) This has inspired me to find other ways to use Prowl, and I’ve already whipped up a NAGIOS event notification via Prowl script, and have already put it to use at work.
Thanks for the script, thanks for the inspiration.
July 28th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
Thanks for the script
Interesting use of the irssi proxy, I just SSH into my machine from whatever computer instead.
August 7th, 2009 at 12:00 am
[...] IRC fans can also find some useful Prowl hacks here. [...]
September 2nd, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Works like a Charm.. thanks!
October 3rd, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Well this didn’t work for me…
I generated API key, pasted it into the .prowlkey and loaded the script in the irssi.
Then i closed my irc-client and my friend tried sent me couple of private messages but i got no new notifications on my iphone.
Is there log or something where i could check what is going wrong?
January 31st, 2010 at 7:27 am
[...] prowlnotify.pl – This script is cool for those who have an iPhone. When your connection is set to away, either by /away or by disconnecting from screen (using the next script), Prowl Notify will use APIs to send your message to your iPhone. It is quite cool if you have an iPhone like I do. [...]