Tell Shimo VPN to Connect with Applescript

Feb 25, 2019 macos

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For some clients, I have to VPN before I can push to their git repositories. I’ve been using a few VPN clients, but I finally settled on one. I’m a huge fan of Shimo but one thing that bothered me was that I still had to click and remember to be on VPN when I wanted to push my changes.

So, with some pointers from the great support team at Shimo/Mailbutler, I came up with the following solution: Create an applescript that checks to see if the VPN is connected, THEN push the changes.

I’ve installed the following bash script in my local path:

vpn-git-push

#!/bin/sh
osascript ~/utils/client-shimo-pre-push.scpt
git push $@

And the scpt AppleScript file contains the following (where vpn.client.com is the name of the account in my Shimo connection manager.)

~/utils/client-shimo-pre-push.scpt

tell application "Shimo"
set p to account "vpn.client.com"
if p is not connected then
  connect account p
end if
end tell

Then, when I’m working with this client, I do vpn-git-push instead of git push and I’m saved from knowing/remembering if my VPN is connected. The only problem is remembering now to use vpn-git-push. I tried to put in a pre-push git hook, but unfortunately, the first step in the process is to update the remote refs. Then, it runs your hook. So, this fails, because our VPN is not connected. If you have better solutions, I’d love to hear them!