Sends an automatic summary email of all new commits and/or pull requests for Github repository branches that you wish to monitor. This script is especially useful when monitoring infrequently updated repositories, saving you the time of manually checking for updates.
Configure the repositories to be monitored in ~/ghnotify.conf (owner, repository and branch, plus a "display" name that will appear in the email) :
#owner/repository/branch display name
MilhouseVH/ghnotify/master GitHub Notify (master)
raspberrypi/firmware/master Raspberry Pi Firmware (master)
raspberrypi/linux/rpi-3.15.y Raspberry Pi Linux (3.15.y)
OpenELEC/OpenELEC.tv/master OpenELEC (master)
xbmc/xbmc/master XBMC (master)
popcornmix/xbmc/newclock3 Popcornmix (newclock3)
Pulse-Eight/libcec/master libcec (master)
sahlberg/libnfs/master libnfs (master)
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/master Kernel Firmware (master)
Including the ghnotify repository is a handy way to be notified of any updates!
Github authentication is necessary to bypass GitHub rate limiting. If you don't plan on running this script very often, eg. one or twice an hour, then it may not be necessary to include authentication.
If you exceeded the hourly data access limit, configure your github username and password in ~/.git.conf to enable much greater limits:
GIT_USERNAME="your_username"
GIT_PASSWORD="your_password"
A suitable email address will be determined from the MAILTO= property in /etc/crontab (if available), otherwise configure your "to" email address in ~/.git.conf:
EMAILTO="your.email@address.com"
The ~/.git.conf file is not required if you don't require authentication and your email address can be determined automatically.
Whenever the script is run succesfully, it will record the latest commit SHA for each monitored repository in ~/ghnotify.commits, and the latest pull request number in ~/ghnotify.pulls.
The script has been tested with the msmtp MTA. Other MTAs may work (eg. sendmail, ssmtp) but are untested - patches welcome.
When run with no arguments, both commits and pulls will be processed (but not tags), and an email will be sent to the configured email address.
debug - see Debugging section below
diags - view web request/response/result details
noemail - don't send the email (create email.html instead)
commits - process only commits
pulls - process only pull requests
tags - process only tags/releases
item=# - process only item #, eg. item=34
Specifying commits or pulls might be useful if you want to be notified of commits often (eg. scheduling the script to run every 30 minutes) but only want to be notified of pull rquests once or twice a day, in which case create two cron entries, one for commits and one for pulls. Otherwise commit and pull request notifications will be sent in the same email.
Since tags/releases change less often, this might be something that is checked once or twice a day.
Interactively run the script with the noemail parameter to avoid sending an email, and instead a file called email.html will be created which can be loaded in your web browser. The ghnotify.dat file will not be updated unless an email is sent successfully.
Use the debug option to output additional information. Data for each repository/branch that has at least one commit or pull request will be dumped into a file prefixed with dbg_commits_ or dbg_pulls_ for subsequent analysis. debug implies noemail.
When run without any parameters, an email will be sent only if there has been at least one new commit or pull request.
If it is not already installed on your system, you will need to install the qprint utility (apt-get install qprint) to encode quoted-printable text.
You will require a Mail Transfer Agent, configured with your email account details. The script has been tested with msmtp.
python (v2.7+) and curl are required.
The script does not require the git utility to be installed unless git:// repositories are being cloned (communication with github.com uses only the GitHub web services API).
