Making GitHub apps with Probot

Posted on Jul 4, 2019 | 3 minutes

GitHub Apps with Probot

Ever see in any issues or Pull Request in GitHub where a bot comments on the PR/Issue or adds labels to the PR/Issue? If you have, they are generally termed as GitHub apps and can be made relatively easily.
Most of these apps are written in JavaScript (Node.js) using Probot, a framework for building apps for GitHub. Probot is written in Typescript, a superset of JavaScript. You can find more about on their website.

Here we’ll make a Simple Issue and Pull Request commenter bot which is made and deployed on Glitch.

Prerequisites

GitHub account
An account on Glitch using GitHub
Basic JavaScript knowledge like variables and strings and functions

Making our App on Glitch

Glitch is a free online code-editing platform. It sets up our environment with all the necessary packages and stuff. All you need to do is click this button👇 and you’ll get a full working environment for your “Remixing”.

What Probot does is that it abstracts the authentication system that all GitHub Apps have to follow - letting you focus on writing API requests without worrying about API tokens or permissions.
Probot ships with an example of setting up an issue commentor bot in index.js. We’ll edit the index.js to the following

//index.js
module.exports = app => {
 // Your code here
 app.log('Yay, the app was loaded!')
 app.on('issues.opened', async context =>({
   const issue=context.payload.issue //getting issue details
   const user=issue.login.user //Getting the username
   const message=`Thanks @${user} for opening this issue!:tada:
   You are awesome..`
   const params = context.issue({ message })
   return context.github.issues.createComment(params)
)
 })
}

The above code is for a bot which comments on new issues. It mentions the user too. The “Robotic” characteristics start from the 4th line starting with app.on function the first argument passed is the action which the bot listens to. These are webhook events of GitHub - you can learn more about them from the Webhook Documentation.
Probot uses Node’s async/await API for returning the data. We used the ` character to enclose the string/comment body because we won’t need to use escape characters and we can also interpolate Template Literals.

Now we need to check if our app is working or not, we can do this clicking on a “sunglasses” button on Glitch which should look like this Glitch Show

Then You’ll see a Page like this Page Click the Register GitHub App button and provide a name and install it in a repository.

Tip: Create a new private repository because we’ll be making a lot of noise for the testing

Now, if you check the .env file you’ll see the variable values auto-filled with the necessary data. Glitch automatically deploys our app and our app will be listening to the webhooks to be received.

Test the app by making a new issue in a test repo on GitHub.

It works right?
Congratulations 🎉🎉 You just made yourself a GitHub App👌👌

Redelivering Webhook⤴️

We can view all the webhooks of any event triggered by the Repository and we can redeliver them by going to Settings->Developer Settings->GitHub Apps->“Your app name”->Advanced Tab in your profile.

Commenting on PRs

We need to add an extra permission for our App to comment on PRs, we can provide that by going to Settings->Develope Settings-><Your_app_name> -> Permissions and Events -> Pull Requests Provide the read and Write Access.
Now we need to edit the index.js to add Support for Pull Request before the last }

//index.js
app.on('pull_request.opened', async context =>{
    const pr = context.payload.pull_request
    const user = pr.user.login //Collecting Details of the person who created the PR
     const msg=context.issue({body:`Hey @${user} :wave: Thanks for the PR !!! You are Awesome.`})
     return context.github.issues.createComment(msg)
  })

Here we add a new “robotic” characteristic by passing a webhook action called pull_request.opened. Now our app listens for PR webhook and once received it emits the context.issue({body}) to GitHub. You can see that we are still passing the body to the createComment function. This is because PRs are considered as another type of Issues in GitHub. For testing if this works, make a new PR and check if the bot comments on that yes.

Congratulations on making a GitHub app. Since it is on Glitch we can install this in any repository and it will work any time too.

You can customise the comments with Images and Gifs but keep in mind that the comments render markdown. You can always import these files to a GitHub repository through Glitch.
Now go forth, explore and make some exciting GitHub apps,❤️❤️

Thanks to

Jason Etcovich, for Proofreading this ❤️
Musthaq Ahamad, for teaching me how to make GitHub Apps

dayDreams ++