How to Build a desktop notification tool for Linux using python

· Dec 12, 2017 · 2 minutes read · Linux Desktop notifications small hack stock price notifier

How to Build a desktop notification tool for Linux using python

What is a desktop notification ?

desktop notification is lika a graphical control element that communicates certain events to the user without forcing them to react to this notification immediately . In other words, it is a simple application which produces a notification message in form of a pop-up message on desktop.

Desktop Notifications

So lets start by creating a small tool “Stock price notifier”

In this example I have used python3 on ubuntu 16.04

Lets follow few steps :-

  1. Install a third party Python module, requests and beautifulsoup using a simple pip command:

    pip3 install beautifulsoup4

    pip3 install requests

  2. Write a small python funtion to get the current stock price :

    from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests
    
    
def get_stock_price():
    url = "https://www.moneycontrol.com/"
    headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0'}
    bse_stock = requests.get(url, headers=headers)
    soup = BeautifulSoup(bse_stock.text, "html.parser")
    cp = soup.find('span', id='cp')
    chg = soup.find('span', id='chg')
    
    if cp:
        cp = cp.text
    else:
        cp = 0
    if chg:
        chg = chg.text
    else:
        chg = 0
    return (cp, chg)

  3. Write onle more python function to send the event to os using subprocess:

        import subprocess as s
    def notify():
        result = get_stock_price()
        result = "Current Price\t:\t %s \nChange \t\t: \t%s " % result
        s.call(['notify-send', 'Stock Update for NIFTY 50', result])

  4. And now finally call the second funtction:

        notify()

Desktop Notifications

Enjoy