Hipchat + Ruby

I’ve started to dig into Hipchat because of its killer free plan and I discovered pretty quickly that it has an awesome API, along with an awesome Ruby gem.

The really cool part about Hipchat’s API is that it has the option to create “notification” tokens, which allow you to post to Hipchat channels without creating a full account. It’s a super simple process - label the key and generate it.

I wrote a little script today that I’m using to send messages to myself remotely from my computer:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'hipchat'

def token
  ENV['HIPCHAT_TOKEN']
end

def room
  ENV['HIPCHAT_ROOM']
end

def name
  ENV['HIPCHAT_NAME']
end

def message
  "@user #{ ARGV.first }"
end

def client
  HipChat::Client.new(token)
end

client[room].send(name, message, message_format: "text")

I dropped that into a $PATH accessible directory and now I can call notify "message" and get a ‘mentioning’ message (this sets off notifications on your desktop/iOS, which is useful) within ten seconds.

Side note: I’ve found that it’s important to set the message_format to "text": the normal format (HTML) doesn’t support things like @mentions, pasted text and URLs. See the documentation for more on this.