linux_reminder

LINUX REMINDER

Features • Requirements • Usage • Development • About • Community

see table of content

• Overview
• Motivation
• Features
• Requirements
• Usage
  • Available configs options
  • Available CLI options
• Development
  • Development setup
  • Used technologies
• About
  • License

🎺 Overview

Schedule daily reminders easily with a simple config file. Organize and receive alerts for important tasks efficiently.

❓ Motivation

My primary motivation for developing this tool was to ensure I don't miss my main daily tasks, such as those related to nutrition, due to being overly focused on work.

⚠️ warning: The reason I opted for the at command to schedule tasks, instead of the popular crontab, was because the latter couldn't properly execute the spd-say and notify-send commands. Despite searching for about 2 hours, I didn't find a successful solution.

🎯 Features

   ✔️ type safe api methods by using zod validation;
   ✔️ three ways to specify task frequency: weekday, weekend or everyday;
   ✔️ option to speach the name of the task;
   ✔️ option to choose the notification style between: notify-send or zenity.

⚠️ Requirements

In order to use this project in your computer, you need to have the following items:

• npm: To install the package. Npm is installed alongside nodejs;
• nodejs: To actually run the package.
• at: To schedule the tasks to run on specified times.
• zenity: to show custom notifications (optional).

💡 Usage

First, make sure to install the at command on linux, which will be used to schedule the reminders:

sudo apt install at

Install the linux_reminder npm package:

# Install the package
npm install linux_reminder -g

Create a reminder configs file such as this (which follows this schema):

{
  "options": {
    "playTextToSpeech": true
  },
  "reminders": [
    {
      "name": "launch",
      "category": "NUTRITION",
      "time": "13:15",
      "days": "everyday"
    },
    {
      "name": "shutdown PC",
      "category": "habits",
      "time": "23:00",
      "days": "everyday"
    }
  ]
}

After that, open a terminal and paste this:

echo $(which node) $(which linux_reminder)
# /home/lucasvtiradentes/.nvm/versions/node/v18.19.0/bin/node /home/lucasvtiradentes/.nvm/versions/node/v18.19.0/bin/linux_reminder

Get the above command result and join with the -s path_of_your_config.json, in my case it would be:

/home/lucasvtiradentes/.nvm/versions/node/v18.19.0/bin/node /home/lucasvtiradentes/.nvm/versions/node/v18.19.0/bin/linux_reminder -s "/home/lucasvtiradentes/Desktop/configs.json"

# tip: make sure to specify the absolute path, do not use $USER/Desktop or ~/Desktop

Finally you can copy the above command and past it on a new instance of Ubuntu's Startup Applications.

And thats it! Now everytime your Ubuntu startup, it will setup all the current day's reminders!

Available configs options

{
  "playTextToSpeech": true,
  "useZenitAsNotifierSender": false,
  "notificationExpireSeconds": 1000
}

Notice that if you specify to use zenity, you'll need to have it installed.

Available CLI options

Usage: linux_reminder [options]

⏰ simple crontab based reminder designed to be used in daily tasks on linux.

Options:
  -V, --version       output the version number
  -s, --setup <file>  setup the reminders to run on the specified datetimes
  -r, --remove        remove all configured reminders
  -l, --list          list all configured reminders
  -h, --help          display help for command

🔧 Development

Development setup

To setup this project in your computer, download it in this link or run the following commands:

# Clone this repository
$ git clone https://github.com/lucasvtiradentes/linux_reminder

# Go into the repository
$ cd linux_reminder

After download it, go to the project folder and run these commands:

# Install dependencies using npm
$ npm install

# Run the typescript code in development mode
$ npm run dev

If you want to contribute to the project, after you make the necessary changes, run these commands to check if everything is working fine:

# Compile the code into javascript
$ npm run build

# Run the compiled code in production mode
$ npm run start

Used technologies

This project uses the following thechnologies:

Scope	Subject	Technologies
Project	Main
Setup	Code linting
	Commit linting
	Other

📚 About

License

This project is distributed under the terms of the MIT License Version 2.0. A complete version of the license is available in the LICENSE file in this repository. Any contribution made to this project will be licensed under the MIT License Version 2.0.

Made with ❤️ by Lucas Vieira

👉 See also all my projects

👉 See also all my articles