statusbot

statusbot is a chat bot built on the Probot framework.

This README is intended to help get you started. Definitely update and improve to talk about your own instance, how to use and deploy, what functionality is available, etc!

What does the bot do?

Right now the bot has two sets of capabilities:

• Doing background management in GitHub:
  • Assign new PRs to the Pipeline for QA project board (REVIEW column).
  • Assign issues that are labeled bounty-awaiting-approval to the Status SOB Swarm project board (bounty-awaiting-approval column).
  • Welcome users who post their first PR in a project.
  • New functionality will be added in the future (wishlist is being tracked here)

The project board names, column names, welcome message and other values are stored in the .github/github-bot.yml file. It can be overriden for each specific repository by adding a file in the same path on the respective repository (see probot-config).

Creating the bot GitHub App

This bot is meant to be packaged as a GitHub App. There are two steps to it: creating the app, and installing the app. Creating a GitHub App only needs to be done once and the app can be made public to be reused for any number of repositories and organizations.

See the official docs for deployment.

1. Create the GitHub App:
   1. In GitHub, go to Settings/Developer settings/GitHub Apps and click on New GitHub App
   2. Enter the bot name in GitHub App name, e.g. Status GitHub Bot
   3. In Homepage URL, enter the /ping endpoint of the service, e.g. https://5e63b0ab.ngrok.io/ping
   4. In Webhook URL, enter the root endpoint of the service, e.g. https://5e63b0ab.ngrok.io/
   5. In Webhook secret (optional), enter a string of characters that matches the value passed in the in the WEBHOOK_SECRET environment variable.
   6. This app requires these Permissions & events for the GitHub App:
      • Issues - Read & Write
        • Check the box for Issue comment events
        • Check the box for Issues events
      • Pull requests - Read & Write
        • Check the box for Pull request events
        • Check the box for Pull request review events
        • Check the box for Pull request review comment events
      • Repository projects - Read & Write
      • Single File - Read-only
        • Path: .github/github-bot.yml
   7. Generate a private key pass and save it.
2. Installing the bot service:
   1. Deploy the bot to the cloud.
   2. Set the APP_ID environment variable to value reported when the GitHub App was created.
   3. Set the WEBHOOK_SECRET environment variable to the value configured in the GitHub App.
   4. Set the PRIVATE_KEY environment variable to the contents of the .pem file.
   5. Set the SLACK_BOT_TOKEN environment variable to the value reported for the bot in Slack.
3. Install the GitHub App in an account:
   1. Select the repositories where the bot should work (e.g. status-react).

Restart the bot

You may want to get comfortable with heroku logs and heroku restart if you're having issues.