This is certainly a useful application, but it suffers from a few limitations. At the time of writing, the
Jenkins Tray Application did not support accessing secured Jenkins servers. In addition, the developer
needs to remember to restart it each morning. This may seem a minor issue, but in general, when it
comes to notification strategies, the less you have to ask of your developers the better.
One of the best options for Jenkins desktop notification is to use a service like Notifo (see Section 8.10,
“Notification via Notifo”), which provides both desktop and mobile clients. We will see how this works
in detail in the next section.
8.10. Notification via Notifo
Notifo^7 is a fast and economical service to send real-time notifications to your smartphone or desktop.
In the context of a Jenkins server, you can use it to set up free or low-cost real-time notification for
your Jenkins build results. Individual accounts (which you need to be able to receive notifications) are
free. You need to set up a service account to send notification messages from your Jenkins server. This
is where Notifo earn their keep, though at the time of writing a service account can send up to 10,000
notifications per month free of charge, which is usually plenty for an average Jenkins instance. One of
the strong points of a real-time notification service like Notifo is that notification messages can be sent
to the same users on different devices: smartphones and desk top clients, in particular.
Setting up Jenkins notification with Notifo is relatively straightforward. First, go to the Notifio website
and sign up to create an account. Each team member who wants to be notified will need their own Notifo
account. They will also need to install the Notifo client on each device on which they need to receive
notification messages. At the time of writing, Notifo clients were available for Windows and Mac OS
X desktops, and iPhones, with support for Linux and other smartphones on the way.
Next, you need to set up a Notifo service account for your Jenkins server. You can do this with one of
your developer accounts, or create a new account for the purpose. Log on to the Notifo website, and
go to the My Services menu. Here, click on Create Service (see Figure 8.21, “Creating a Notifo service
for your Jenkins instance”), and fill in the fields. The most important is the Service Username, which
needs to be unique. You can also specify the Site URL and the Default Notification URL to point to your
Jenkins instance, so that users can open the Jenkins console by clicking on the notification message.