I’m setting up a new MacBook Pro and everything is going so much better than on a previous configuration (with a vendor supplied mac ports, etc…) but that is another story. I was setting up autotest and growl and ran into the same issues that I discovered with Leopard and growlnotify (see here, here and here). Anyway, none of the suggested configs worked at all this time around.

So I played around with the settings and ended up with this config which (knock on wood) seems to work pretty well.

I started with the following versions:

  1. Leopard 10.5.8
  2. ZenTest 4.1.4
  3. Growl 1.1.6
  4. autotest-growl gem 0.1.6
  5. autotest-fsevent 0.1.1
  6. autotest-rails 4.1.0

I didn’t need to make any adjustments to the growl configuration (via System Preferences) as reported in some solutions.

I added the following to the ~/.autotest file

require 'autotest/growl'
require 'autotest/fsevent'
Autotest::Growl::show_modified_files = true
Autotest::Growl::remote_notification = false
Autotest.add_hook :initialize do |at|
%w{.git .svn .hg .DS_Store ._* log}.each {|exception|at.add_exception(exception)}
end

I added some appropriately named images to the suggested ~/.autotest-growl directory per the really good (don’t skip over them, lots to learn if you have used an older config) instructions.

I then renamed the growlnotify app in /usr/local/bin to /usr/local/bin/growlnotify.wrapper (make sure it is executable with chmod if needed) and added the following wrapper (taken from Craig P Jolicoeu’s suggestion) as /usr/local/bin/growlnotify


#!/bin/bash
exec /usr/local/bin/growlnotify.wrapped -w "$@" &

That was it, autotest (and other apps) growl everytime now. Pretty easy (after I tried three or four other things that didn’t work). It seems the networked approaches with -H and other configs didn’t really work for me. The simplified wrapper seems to be all that is needed.

The other reported issues about growl not working if configured near the dock didn’t seem to cause me any issues (dock is on the bottom, growl is lower left).

Now my little robot friend (autotest) keeps me honest without fail.

Hope this helps.