Awesome

Github Nice Guy

Let's face it, open pull requests are often forgotten. It can happen for a multitude of reasons, ranging from losing interest in the project, to a comment that was never answered.

Github Nice Guy is a small Ruby script that fetches the open pull requests for a given user (or organization) and sends a weekly friendly reminder with links to them to whoever you think should know about it.

This is how it looks:

email template

Getting Started

The best way to get Github Nice Guy up and running is to clone this repo into a server.

cd /any/path/you/like
git clone git@github.com:zamith/github-nice-guy.git
bundle install

Configuration

All the configuration is done through environment variables. Albeit possible to use export to set all the variables, dotenv has been added for convenience.

If you've never used dotenv, what it does is read from a .env file and load all the variables in there into environment variables. A Github Nice Guy configuration file looks like this:

GITHUB_BASIC_AUTH=username:password
SEARCH_USER=user_or_orgnization_name
RECIPIENTS=one@example.com,two@example.com
SMTP_ADDRESS=smtp_address # e.g. smtp.gmail.com
SMTP_DOMAIN=smtp_domain # e.g. gmail.com
SMTP_PORT=smtp_port # e.g. 587
SMTP_USERNAME=smtp_username
SMTP_PASSWORD=smtp_password
SMTP_AUTH=smtp_auth # e.g. plain

GITHUB_BASIC_AUTH is optional, it is only needed if you want to search through private repos as well.

SMTP_ADDRESS, SMTP_DOMAIN, SMTP_PORT and SMTP_AUTH will take the defaults in the comments if none are passed.

Running it

Once the configuration is done, you should be able to run it:

export RUN=true; bundle exec ruby github_nice_guy.rb

By default the script does not do anything when ran, thus the setting of the RUN variable. To make it go back to it's former behaviour, unset the variable.

unset RUN

Note: The API call and emails are being sent from the same process of the program, so it may take a minute or two, depending on your connection.

Cron jobs

The best way to have a server execute a repeating job is to schedule it as a cron job.

To help with that, Github Nice Guy uses whenever. You can change the file at config/schedule.rb as you prefer (or leave it as is), and when you're done run:

bundle exec whenever -w github_nice_guy

That should do it. If you didn't change the schedule you'll be getting an email every day at 9 am local time to the server.

License

The MIT License (MIT)

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.