René's URL Explorer Experiment

{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"DiscussionForumPosting","headline":"Modernizing the project","articleBody":"First of, I love our GitHub bot. It's an essential piece of our infrastructure, and it can fill the gaps where GitHub Actions don't work well (the whole read-only, no secrets situation with forked PRs). With that being said, I have been trying to contribute to the project and the entry barrier seems somewhat high:\r\n\r\n1) Getting the development environment working on my machine took between one and two hours\r\n2) There's no way (afaik) to properly test Jenkins hooks\r\n3) Some of the dependencies we use are deprecate (`github`, `request`, there might be others too)\r\n  1) `github` is not only deprecated, it lacks documentation. To find out which method to use, developers need to look into the TypeScript definition and then figure out which GitHub API is being called to read the documentation on https://developer.github.com/v3/\r\n4) Some parts of the code have hardcoded `nodejs` as org and `node` as repository, which makes it impossible for users to test without finding these conditionals and changing them/commenting those out\r\n\r\nThe project is also heavily callback-oriented, some parts would probably benefit from changing to an `async/await`-oriented implementation (I know this is more controversial, so I won't push too much on it).\r\n\r\nBased on the points above, I have some suggestions to modernize the project:\r\n\r\n1) To improve the development experience, we could set up our own relay, which would essentially be a multiplexer receiving webhook calls from `nodejs/node-auto-test`. Anyone who wants to collaborate would connect to that relay, and they would receive the appropriate tokens needed for testing. We could add checks so that only certain teams are allowed to request access. We can also have a separate user with permissions limited to `nodejs/node-auto-test`, to prevent folks from mistakenly affecting other repositories. The same relay could be used for Jenkins hooks.\r\n2) To avoid hardcoded repositories and orgs, we could move some of the logic to the repositories. For example, [labeling is only enabled on `nodejs/node`](https://github.com/nodejs/github-bot/blob/master/scripts/node-subsystem-label.js#L16-L17), if we moved the labels definition to `nodejs/node` (so that the bot loads the definition when needed), it would be easier for collaborators to include/remove definitions for new files, and it would also allow the bot to detect if that repository supports labeling or not.\r\n3) Replacing deprecated dependencies and potentially moving more towards `async/await` API might be harder. We could either start a new branch from scratch, or try to modernize different pieces individually. Either way it will need some coordination efforts as well as a lot of work to get it working properly.\r\n\r\nAs an alternative, we could turn the `github-bot` into an Actions relay: it would receive events from GitHub and Jenkins, and would forward those events to the [repository dispatch API](https://help.github.com/en/actions/reference/events-that-trigger-workflows#external-events-repository_dispatch). This way, we could define everything as Actions on the respective repositories, circumventing the gaps with Actions on forked PRs and being able to define Actions for Jenkins events.\r\n\r\nWhat do folks think? cc @nodejs/github-bot ","author":{"url":"https://github.com/mmarchini","@type":"Person","name":"mmarchini"},"datePublished":"2020-06-30T00:30:40.000Z","interactionStatistic":{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":"https://schema.org/CommentAction","userInteractionCount":9},"url":"https://github.com/264/github-bot/issues/264"}