Use the Command Line Interface

The Mattermost Notify package comes with a command line interface (CLI) that allows you to send messages to your Mattermost server.

The primary command is send which allows you to send messages to channels or users. The command has the following syntax:

mattermost-notify send "your message" --channel <channel_name> OR --user <user_name>

The command requires that your message is enclosed in quotes. You can send messages to channels or users by providing the –channel or –user flag respectively (they are mutually exclusive, so you can only send either to a channel or to a user at one time).

You can also upload files alongside your message by providing the –files option, followed by a list of file paths separated by spaces. The files will be uploaded to the Mattermost server and linked in the message. For example:

now=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")
mattermost-notify send "Logfile from: $now" --channel simulations --files /path/to/simulations/logfile.txt

The command will send the message to the simulations channel and upload the file logfile.txt to the channel.

Updating Messages

You can update messages that you have sent previously. This is easier to do in the Python API so consider integrating your monitoring directly into long-running scripts or jupyter notebooks! If you cannot avoid using the CLI then here is how you can update a message:

Send a message and save the message hook to a file using the -s <filename> or –save-hook <filename>. This will create a file that another Mattermost Notify client can read in order to update the message.
Update the message using the update command (instead of send)

Taken together, the process looks like this:

# some data to send and keep up to date
progress=$(tail -n 1 /path/to/simulations/progress.txt)

# first send a message and provide a filename to save the message hook
mattermost-notify send "Simulation progress: $progress" --channel simulations --save-hook simulation_progress.msg

# wait for a while
sleep 10

# and update the message
progress=$(tail -n 1 /path/to/simulations/progress.txt)
mattermost-notify update "Simulation progress: $progress" --hook simulation_progress.msg

Specifying a Configuration File

Mattermost Notify stores the connection data and login credentials in a configuration file (which is automatically generated if you ran mattermost-notify setup). The configuration file is located in the user’s home directory and is named .mattermost-notify. If for some reason you want to use a different configuration file (e.g. to send to a different server), you can specify it using the –configfile option. For example:

mattermost-notify send "this is a test" --channel simulations --configfile /path/to/your/.mattermost-notify