probot service registry

[zeke]

Just a thought...

As a probot developer, I would like to submit my bot repository URL and have GitHub take care of running the service for me (rather than running my own on Heroku, Now, etc). This would take the burden off me as an individual to keep a bot service running, and give the community more confidence that the bots they're using will be consistently available (i.e. not sleeping, running out of dyno hours, etc).

[JasonEtco]

@zeke funny you should mention that, we've had the same thought many times. Glad to hear this point of friction is consistent!

This would be nothing short of game-changing. I'm not sure if we've shared this ask with the correct team - @bkeepers might have?

[anshumanv]

It would be cool if this can be done, we can get rid of third party deployment platforms in that case. 😄

[gr2m]

I would not get rid of third party deployments altogether, Probot should still work nicely with others, but the initial setup would be so. much. nicer.

Maybe we can build a probot app to deploy probot apps :D Install it your repo and then it gets continously deployes, sorta like GitHub Pages.

One challenge is the sharing of the private key and the secret, there is no simple way to do that as far as I know. People would still need to create a github app themselves, set a secret, generate and download the private key, than somehow upload the private key to the "registry" and pass the secret