generate-pr-alerts

generate-pr-alerts

GitHub's Pull Request feature is one of the best things to ever happen to collaborative software development. Unfortunately, PRs can also be a parking lot for code. There is a feature that can remind you of open PRs if configured properly, but I had a need to generate a minor report. Basically, I'm surveying a very large number of repositories in an organization and needed birdseye view at the org level rather than a Teams level.

This is where generate-pr-alerts comes in. It can check arbitrary repos or it can fetch repo urls via those attached to an Organization. This makes it simple and easy to monitor many repos at the org level.

By default, generate-pr-alerts will fetch information from GitHub and print to STDOUT. The text format is in Markdown and provides a short summary of open PRs as well as convenient links directly to them.

Configuration

First thing first, you'll need to generate a Personal Access Token. You can create a PAT in the Token Settings page. That will be a special token that will give the app access to everything that you have access to (unless you choose to restrict those options when generating the token).

You can also choose to have generate-pr-alerts look for specific repos, pull repo information from organizations, or both. Repos are designated using the format username/reponame. For example, specifying this repo would be Grayson/dashboard. Organizations are specified by their "login" name.

In addition to printing information to stdout, you can also generate a JSON file that contains the top level information about these PRs and Issues. By default, this file is not created. However, you can specify a file path using the json key and one will be created at that location.

You can specify this information either as a CLI flag or in a config.yml file placed in the same folder as the generate-pr-alerts executable. The token property is a string that can only be set once, but the repos and orgs can be specified as arrays (in the YAML) or defined multiple times as CLI flags.

These two example configurations should be effectively identical:

token: pat_github_token
repos:
- Grayson/dashboard
- Grayson/code-clone-tool
orgs:
- objectiveceo
json: /Users/grayson/Desktop/output.json

$ ./generate-pr-alerts -token pat_github_token -repo Grayson/dashboard -repo Grayson/code-clone-tool -orgs objectiveceo -json /Users/grayson/Desktop/output.json

Here's a brief table summarizing what is an array in the yaml or is repeatable on the command line:

There may be times when you want to set the token as an environment variable. If no token is specified on the command line or in the configuration file, generate-pr-alerts will check to see if the GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable is set.