Get local notification alerts from irssi on a remote server, and use autossh to keep the ssh connection alive after connection loss.

Notification alerts from irssi (and keeping ssh connection alive).md

Local notification alerts from irssi on a remote server (and keep the ssh connection alive after connection loss)

First of all, thanks to prebenlm for making his walkthrough Irssi in Mac OS X Notification Center.

This is made with OS X in mind, but, should be easily transported over to other systems. Just use another notification system instead of the Apple Notification center and terminal-notifier (and you'll also have to workout the auto launch of the scripts yourself)...

Programs you'll need

1. autossh
2. terminal-notifier

Both are available via macports or brew...

I'm assuming irssi is already set up on a remote server with the fnotify plugin.

Set up autossh

Make an automator application (run as shell script) executing the following:

/opt/local/bin/autossh -M 0 -f -N -p 22 -g -c 3des -D 1080 user@server

A picture depicting this step:

Set up terminal-notifier

You need to have your server set up with a private key first.

Add the following function to your .bashrc/.zshrc at the bottom:

irssi_notifier() {
  (ssh user@server -o PermitLocalCommand=no \
    ": > .irssi/fnotify ; tail -f .irssi/fnotify " |  \
  while read heading message; do                      \
    url=`echo "${message}" | grep -Eo 'https?://[^ >]+' | head -1`; \
    if [ ! "$url" ]; then terminal-notifier -message "${message}" -title "${heading}" -activate com.googlecode.iterm2; \
    else terminal-notifier -message "${message}" -title "${heading}" -open "${url}"; \
    fi; \
  done)
}

• Replace the user@server bit, with your server information.
• Adjust the paths to fnotify
• the -activate com.googlecode.iterm2 bit will activate iTerm2 open click. If you use the terminal, replace this with com.apple.Terminal.
• It will open urls in your browser, if it's found one in the highlight.

then, create a script in a place you remember, called irssi_notify.sh, with the following (change to bash if you're using that)

#!/opt/local/bin/zsh
source ~/.zshrc; irssi_notifier;

Launch on startup

To make autossh launch on startup, simply add the .app file to login items.

To make the irssi_notifier.sh script launch on startup, navigate to ~/Library/LaunchAgents and a file called com.irssi.notifier.plist with the following content:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
  <key>Label</key>
  <string>com.irssi.notifier</string>
  <key>Program</key>
  <string>/User/username/Documents/irssi_notify.sh</string>
  <key>KeepAlive</key>
  <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

Where you replace username with your username (or, replace the path with whereever you stored irssi_notify.sh).

Lastly, run launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.irssi.notifier.plist to add it to the startup items.

Done!

Now you can enjoy getting IRC highlights whenever you have a working connection.

A side-note, the reason I didn't use mosh to do what I accomplished with autossh, is because of running into trouble executing commands directly after a connection initiation (mosh user@server 'echo 1' fails instantly, to give an example).

That said, I do recommend using mosh instead of ssh normally, since it works excellent, except for that specific usecase.