sit-inbox

sit-inbox is a tool that helps managing inbound additions for SIT repositories over different transports. A common case would be accepting patches for a Git repository for a SIT repository portion of it, allowing others to contribute their additions to other parties in an automated way.

This tool is built with decentralized scenarios in mind. It can enable workflows that don't require hosting it on a publicly accessible server. For example, by piggying back on e-mail, it can be operated on a regular end-user computer, sporadically connected to the internet.

Currently, sit-inbox supports:

• receiving patches for Git-hosted SIT repositories over IMAP, POP3 and Maildir

This list is expected to grow.

It is packaged as a Docker container to make its installation and operation easier.

Building

In order to build it, you'll need make and docker:

make

Usage

sit-inbox comes with a small convenience helper that can be used either directly from the source root or installed using make install:

sit-inbox new path/to/new/setup

This will create default structure for an inbox. You will need to edit etc/config.toml configuration and possibly add more arguments to the docker container (most likely, for extra volumes) in `.dockerargs.

In order to run the inbox, simply do this:

sit-inbox run path/to/setup

After (successful) [re-]provisioning, you should see something like this:

Upon startup, sit-inbox will attempt to retrieve updates from inboxes that don't have autostart disabled.

By default, it will keep fetching email every minute. this can be changed with the cron option for every inbox config entry, it takes the standard crontab time entry format:

*     *     *   *    *
-     -     -   -    -
|     |     |   |    |
|     |     |   |    +----- day of week (0 - 6) (Sunday=0)
|     |     |   +------- month (1 - 12)
|     |     +--------- day of        month (1 - 31)
|     +----------- hour (0 - 23)
+------------- min (0 - 59)

The above user interface also allows the operator to observe logs and manually invoke operations such as mail retrieval.

Configuration

An example configuration for a trivial setup will look something like:

[target.repo]
type = "git"
source = "https://username:password@host/repo.git"
git_username = "sit-inbox"
git_email = "inbox@server.com"

[inbox.email]
type = "email"
retriever = "SimpleIMAPSSLRetriever"
server = "mail.server.com"
username = "inbox@server.com"
password = "password"
default_target = "repo"

Please refer to schema.yaml for almost-human-interpretable schema for the config.toml file. It'd be great to convert it into Markdown or something like it, so if you're up to it -- please contribute.

Updating issues

In order to manage issues and merge requests in this project, we're using SIT with issue-tracking module and sit-inbox itself (duh!)

Assuming basic familiarity with SIT workflow (sit-web for issues, sit mr script), prepare a branch with a patch and send updates to this repository:

git send-email --to=sit-inbox@inbox.sit.fyi master..<branch>