/sympy-bot-1

GitHub bot for SymPy

Primary LanguagePythonOtherNOASSERTION

SymPy Bot

This is a GitHub bot for SymPy. It runs on Heroku and uses the @sympy-bot GitHub user.

The bot makes sure that every pull request to SymPy has a release notes entry in the pull request description. It then automatically adds these notes to the release notes on the wiki when the pull request is merged.

See the guide on the SymPy wiki on how to write release notes.

The bot may also do other things in the future. If you have any suggestions or have found any bugs, please open an issue. Pull requests are welcome too.

Setting up the bot

This tutorial is very good on how to set up Heroku and write GitHub bots. This bot is based on it.

The bot is tied to Heroku, so any push to this repo is automatically deployed there (it is currently configured to not deploy until the Travis tests pass). The Heroku dashboard is at https://dashboard.heroku.com/apps/sympy-bot

If the bot stops working, look at the logs with

heroku logs -a sympy-bot

(you need to install the heroku command line tools and have access to the sympy-bot Heroku app). You can also see the logs on Heroku.

Next, you need to set up the bot on GitHub. To do so, follow these steps:

  1. Go to the webhooks settings (for instance, at https://github.com/sympy/sympy/settings/hooks), and create a new webhook.

    • Set the payload URL to the Heroku app URL (for instance, https://sympy-bot.herokuapp.com/)
    • Set the content type to application/json
    • Generate a random password for the secret. I used the keychain app on my Mac to generate a 20 character password with random characters. Save this secret, as you will need to enter it in Heroku as well.
    • Under "Which events would you like to trigger this webhook?" select "Let me select individual events.". Then make sure only Pull requests is checked.
    • Make sure Active is checked

  2. Go to Heroku and under the settings UI (e.g., https://dashboard.heroku.com/apps/sympy-bot/settings), create two config variables:

    • GH_SECRET: set this to the secret you created in step 1 above
    • GH_AUTH: set this to the personal access token for the sympy-bot user. If you don't have this or need to regenerate it, login as the bot user and go to the personal access token settings (at https://github.com/settings/tokens), and create a new token. VERY IMPORTANT: Give the token public_repo access only.

  3. Give the sympy-bot user push access to the repo. This is required for the bot to set commit statuses and to push to the wiki. If you know how to allow it to do this without giving it as much access, please let me know. I have tried playing with using reviews instead of statuses, but I couldn't get it to work.

  4. Run

    heroku labs:enable runtime-dyno-metadata -a sympy-bot

    to enable the bot version environment variable (run this if the version is "version not found!").

Testing

There is a testing deploy set up at https://dashboard.heroku.com/apps/sympy-bot-testing. Currently, it is configured to run on https://github.com/asmeurer/GitHub-Issues-Test.

To test, push to a separate branch (master has branch protection) on this repo (you can also set up a separate testing deploy for your fork if you want). Then go to https://dashboard.heroku.com/apps/sympy-bot-testing/deploy/github and manually deploy the branch. You can also enable automatic deployments for the branch if you want to do many tests against it.

Wiki Push Test

On Travis, there is a test that the wiki updates properly, which tests against https://github.com/sympy/sympy-bot/wiki/Release-Notes-Tests. This requires a personal access token to be installed on Travis.

This token is currently given on the @sympy-bot GitHub user. To regenerate it, login as @sympy-bot, and go to https://github.com/settings/tokens/. Create a new token, checking only the public_repo box. Be sure to indicate in the description that the token is for Travis testing, and be sure to revoke any old tokens. The @sympy-bot user needs push access to this repo for the test to work. Then go to https://travis-ci.org/sympy/sympy-bot/settings and add the token as an environment variable for TESTING_TOKEN. Make sure to set the variable as not visible in the build log. The environment variable should show up as a lock after it has been added.

The test will only be run on Travis builds on branches pushed to this repo (it won't run on branches pushed to forks). Thus, if you make any changes to this code, someone with push access will need to push your branch up to the main repo in order for it to be tested.

Debugging Webhooks

To debug webhooks, you can go to the webhooks settings for the repo the bot is set up on (e.g., https://github.com/sympy/sympy/settings/hooks), and click the webhook for https://sympy-bot.herokuapp.com/. This will show you all recent webhooks that were delivered, with the exact JSON that was delivered as well as the headers and the response. Each webhook has a corresponding UUID (the delivery id), which is printed by the bot in the logs when it receives it.

Rate Limits

GitHub has a rate limit of 5000 requests per hour. A single bot action may result in multiple API requests. You can see the current rate limit and when it resets at https://sympy-bot.herokuapp.com/. If the bot detects that its rate limits are getting very low, it will post a warning comment on a pull request. Right now, the bot doesn't use the API very much, so we never get near the rate limits, unless someone were to attempt to spam it. However, in the future, this could become an issue if the bot is made to do more stuff.