hipchat-hotline provides a command line interface for sending messages via HipChat using node.
Once installed globally, you easily can send hipchat messages from your terminal or from shell scripts.
Before I wrote hipchat-hotline, my team members and I were building our code in Jenkins, but we were all relying on HipChat "Room Notifications" to let us know how the build went.
This was problematic. What we really we wanted was a direct message so that we wouldn't miss information we were depending on.
We already had a node environment to build our code, so I installed hipchat-hotline into our Jenkins instances and setup a Post Build Action to send messages directly to a user.
I sent messages to the email address on the last commit:
git log -n 1 --oneline --format="%ae" HEAD
And I would include the first line of their commit message:
git log -n 1 --oneline HEAD
Beyond build jobs, hipchat-hotline proved useful in any situation where we wanted to communicate from an automated jenkins job to the greater HipChat community– code deploys, configuration changes, etc.