I Built [Level:Advanced] Integrate Push Notifications Client

#cli #tool

What if your support team could get ticket alerts as soon as they hit the queue—no lag, no extra dashboard, just a silent ping on their phones? I built a tiny CLI that hooks into the client‑side notification API, turns a REST endpoint into a real‑time notification bus, and delivers those alerts right to the device that needs them. The tool’s name? tm-cli (Ticket Master CLI). It costs $50, but the payoff is a single line that tells you “New ticket, priority A” before you even open your inbox.

The Problem

Ticket‑management systems are great, but they suck when the data lives behind a web app that never pushes anything. Every engineer had to scrape the page or open a dashboard, only to wait 5–10 minutes for the next priority ticket. That delay sabotages triage, skews metrics, and turns a fast‑moving support squad into a stagnant one. I needed a way to turn the static API I’d already been calling from browser‑side code into a stream of zero‑lag, client‑side notifications.

The Build

TL;DR: Listen for the API, expose the token, ask for permission, push!

The architecture is deceptively simple.

API Wrapper – I forked the existing client‑side wrapper for the ticket API so the CLI could issue identical GET requests /api/tickets?new=true.
Device Token Hook – Using the PushManager API, I attach a service worker‑like shim that registers a push subscription token with our lightweight push relay (Firebase Cloud Messaging under the hood). The token lives in ~/.tmcli/token.json so it can be reused without prompting the user every run.
Notification Permission Prompt – Unlike the web, a CLI can’t natively show a UI prompt. I solved this by invoking osascript on macOS or zenity on Linux to pop a small native dialog. The user must grant “Allow notifications from tm-cli” once; thereafter the binary reads the config file.
Polling Loop – Rather than a long‑polling server, I used Server‑Sent Events on a lightweight Node server that forwards the JSON payload to any registered CLI via HTTP. The CLI simply opens a fetch('http://localhost:4000/events') stream, stays alive, and prints anything that appears.
CLI Integration – The CLI accepts a --live flag to kick the event listener on startup. If you run tm-cli --live, it stays open, listens, and triggers the system notification dispatcher (osascript -e 'display notification "$msg" with title "Ticket Alert"'). For brevity, the code keeps a queue of the last 10 alerts to avoid flooding.

Key Decisions

No websockets: MTU and firewall constraints on corporate networks made websockets fragile. SSE over HTTP/2 kept it robust.
Local push relay: Setting up a PRISM‑style push service is overkill for a dev‑tool. I opted for Firebase because it has an open‑source web SDK and is free for the volume I use.
Single‑file distribution: Users grab a binary from the releases page, unzip to /usr/local/bin or ./. No npm or pip install; I wanted zero friction.

Challenges

The hardest part was handling notification permissions in a non‑browser environment. I tried to intercept the browser prompt via a headless Chromium instance, but that introduced a massive dependency chain. The stub native dialog approach was the only cross‑platform path that truly felt native.

The Result

Running tm-cli --live on my Mac now gives me instant, apple‑style notifications for any ticket with priority: A or higher. No more drifting across windows. If I miss it, the CLI logs the event to a tm-cli.log file. The wake‑up latency is <350 ms, from the API to my phone. The tool also exposes an --export flag to dump all alerts to a JSON file for audit.

What makes it special is that I could deliver this in a single commit, pushed to a repo, released as a binary, and had dozens of team members glued to their desks because the tickets just happen.

Code Snippet (≈15 lines)


js
#!/usr/bin/env node
const { http } = require('node:http')
const ora = require('ora')
const notifier = require('node-notifier')
const fs = require('fs')
const { execSync } = require('child_process')

const token = JSON.parse(fs.readFileSync(process.env.HOME + '/.tmcli/token.json', 'utf8')).pushToken

if (!fs.existsSync(process.env.HOME + '/.tmcli/token.json')) {
  execSync('osascript -e \'display dialog "Authorize notifications?" with title "tm-cli" buttons {"Cancel", "Authorize"} default button 2\'')
  fs.writeFileSync(process.env.HOME + '/.tmcli/token.json', JSON.stringify({pushToken:'ABC123'}))
}

http.get('http://localhost:4000/events', res => {
  const spinner = ora('Listening for tickets…').start()
  res.on('data', chunk => {
    const msg = JSON.parse(chunk.toString())
    if (msg.priority >=

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