Using github hooks instead of pollings for updating review site

[MichaelMayorov]

Could we use github API hooks https://help.github.com/articles/post-receive-hooks instead of /update and /quickupdate(they just poll github) on review site? Benefits:

1. Realtime updating information about pull requests
2. In future, we could use it in "sympy-bot work" without asking github for realtime updating on client side.

For realtime updating we could use "Comet" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_(programming) model on sympy-bot web. BTW, Google App Engine supports "Comet" http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2010/05/app-engine-at-google-io-2010.html

[asmeurer]

@certik will you be able to review this?

[certik]

@MichaelMayorov, absolutely. As a first step, the web app should get updated using github hooks, however not the post-receive hook which is triggered only when pushed into the master, but rather these hooks:

http://developer.github.com/v3/repos/hooks/

which get triggered whenever a new pull request is created. I currently don't have time to work on it --- if you want to give it a shot, and send a pull request, that would be really awesome!

@asmeurer, there is nothing to review yet, or am I missing some code?

[asmeurer]

Sorry. I'm so used to github issues being pull requests.

[toolforger]

Relying on a github-specific mechanism means switching to another platform will be harder. While I believe we're currently extremely happy with github, github's policies could change at any time - for example, when bought by a big company (think Sun's drasticy policy changes after they were bought by Oracle).

The point is moot if we can expect to have similar hooks in any other service that we might be moving to. Or if we say that using hooks will save us much more work than we'd incur on rebuilding the infrastructure for a different site. Do we?

[MichaelMayorov]

I not quite understand how to use this hooks http://developer.github.com/v3/repos/hooks/ I tried

curl -d '{ "name": "web", "active": true, "config": { "url": "http://something.com/webhook" } }' "https://api.github.com/repos/MichaelMayorov/test-hooks" { "message": "Not Found" }

and

curl "https://api.github.com/repos/MichaelMayorov/test-hooks/hooks" { "message": "Not Found" }

How to use this API?

[certik]

I think that the address "https://api.github.com/repos/sympy/sympy/hooks" is correct. However, you need to be authenticated to github first, see here:

http://developer.github.com/v3/#authentication

$ curl -u certik https://api.github.com/repos/certik/sympy/hooks
Enter host password for user 'certik':
[
  {
    "updated_at": "2012-06-24T22:45:44Z",
    "config": {
      "domain": "",
      "user": "certik",
      "token": "blablabla"
    },
    "events": [
      "push"
    ],
    "created_at": "2012-06-20T21:14:23Z",
    "name": "travis",
    "id": 306085,
    "url": "https://api.github.com/repos/certik/sympy/hooks/306085",
    "last_response": {
      "status": "ok",
      "message": "OK",
      "code": 200
    },
    "active": true
  }
]

[certik]

So the authentication is another problem --- the webapp needs to be using OAuth I think: http://developer.github.com/v3/oauth/, it shouldn't be very difficult to setup, but it will take some time to nail it down.

[MichaelMayorov]

Most of works already done, but I found that some pull requests have "mergeable": "None" Obviously, that these pulls will be never showed on main page. How we should handle this situation? I suggest make "None" equal to "False"

[MichaelMayorov]

Ok, now hooks seems work, but I still need test of my code.

Here is my draft http://shell.marchael.ru/ (currenlty forwarded from my notebook and may be unreacheable) with one open pull and one closed

[MichaelMayorov]

@asmeurer You'll give me a favour if you'll create web-hook to my work machine. So I'll be able to see incoming pulls to sympy/sympy

[MichaelMayorov]

I opened pull request https://github.com/sympy/sympy-bot/pull/113

I Hope someone will review this code :)

[certik]

Thanks! I am on it.

[asmeurer]

None probably means it could not determine the mergability (or possibly that it hasn't been computed yet). I see this sometimes in the web interface. I imagine repolling would usually fix the problem.

[MichaelMayorov]

https://github.com/sympy/sympy-bot/pull/113 was merged and this issue could be closed.