gulp-notify breaks Travis CI

[anissen]

Here is an excerpt from the log of a failing Travis CI build:

events.js:72
        throw er; // Unhandled 'error' event
              ^
Error: Command failed: /bin/sh: 1: notify-send: not found
    at ChildProcess.exithandler (child_process.js:637:15)
    at ChildProcess.EventEmitter.emit (events.js:98:17)
    at maybeClose (child_process.js:743:16)
    at Socket.<anonymous> (child_process.js:956:11)
    at Socket.EventEmitter.emit (events.js:95:17)
    at Pipe.close (net.js:466:12)

The command "gulp ci" exited with 8.

Done. Your build exited with 1.

Is this a gulp-notify-bug or is there some workaround to prevent it from running/failing on Travis or similar Linux-systems without notify-send installed?

[mikaelbr]

I think this is more of a bug in node-notifier. There should be a test there, seeing if notify-send is supported. Will post issue! Thanks for letting me know!

[anissen]

Wow, that was a quick response! Thanks :)

[mikaelbr]

This is now fixed in mikaelbr/node-notifier#3, but I have some issues updating the package on NPM at this moment. But I will update the dependency as soon as I can.

[mikaelbr]

The dependency is now updated and there is a new version of gulp-notify. You might how ever get error that notify-send, isn't installed. I'll look into the possibility of adding a silent mode or fallbacking on gutil-log if no notification reporter is found.

You might also consider not using gulp-notify on your ci task, as it doesn't make too much sense to use it - or use gulp-if and gulp-util.env to conditionally activate gulp-notify depending on environment.

[anissen]

I updated to gulp-notify 0.4.6 but it still breaks Travis -- now in which, however.

events.js:72
        throw er; // Unhandled 'error' event
              ^
Error: not found: notify-send
    at F (/home/travis/build/anissen/parsecs/node_modules/gulp-notify/node_modules/node-notifier/node_modules/which/which.js:43:28)
    at E (/home/travis/build/anissen/parsecs/node_modules/gulp-notify/node_modules/node-notifier/node_modules/which/which.js:46:29)
    at /home/travis/build/anissen/parsecs/node_modules/gulp-notify/node_modules/node-notifier/node_modules/which/which.js:57:16
    at Object.oncomplete (fs.js:107:15)

---

The reason I use gulp-notify on my ci task is because my ci task depends on ["build", "test"] and build uses gulp-notify...

[mikaelbr]

I think the best way is to use gulp-util.env to handle this.

Example:

gulp.task('task', function() {
  gulp.src('./src/*.js')
    .pipe(gutil.env.type !== 'ci' ? notify() : gutil.noop())
    .pipe(gulp.dest('./dist/'));
});

And then you can run gulp with env type of ci. gulp-util.env is a wrapper for minimist, so see documentation of that to see usage of flags.

Edit: Inverted env type check. Should use nofity() when not on CI.

[anissen]

That's an acceptable workaround for now :)

[mikaelbr]

You can also make it fail silently by handling the error event that gulp-notify triggers.

..
 .pipe(notify())
 .on('error', gutil.log);

But due to pipe() this will stop pipeing (but it works if notify is the final step). To continue even on error, you can see the gulp-plumber project.

[LostCrew]

👍 for the env check