This repository holds the source code to the pull request pre-processing bot that processes student submission to Github in the National University of Singapore, School of Computing CS2103: Software Engineering class.
There are two goals the bot is achieving for the CS2103 Teaching Team:
- Ensures that students provide sufficient information on their pull requests so that the bot can identify the students' tutors and assign the tutors to the correct pull request for reviewing purpose.
- Ensures that students submit their pull requests to the correct repository, given that there is a distinction between repositories on
se-eduvs the repositories forked for the semester.
The bot uses Accuser, a library that enables this bot to process PRs and issues on repositories we selected.
The Github access token is to be stored in an environment variable called GITHUB_TOKEN. Tokens can be created and managed for nus-cs2103-bot by signing to the account and visiting Settings > Developer Settings > Personal Access Tokens. Do not commit the token into the repository for security reasons. You may create a file .env in the root folder of this repository to set the environment variables for this bot.
The current semester's Github account / organization name can be set in the src/data.json, along with the highest level of addressbook (1-4) repository available to the students in the currentLevel setting in the same file. The tutors' tutorial class mapping can also be set in the src/data.json file.
There are two main way of getting information about the repositories that the bot is watching: webhooks or interval polling.
Webhooks require the bot to expose a HTTP URL endpoint which Github can perform a HTTP request to whenever there are new changes to the repository. Specifically for Github, new PRs can be received as notifications through this endpoint. This can be thought of as a push model. However, having an unsecured HTTP resource available to the internet may subject the bot to spam or denial of service attacks. The need to secure the HTTP resource may also pose additional requirements which may be out of scope for the bot.
Interval polling on the other hand would require the bot to request information periodically from Github through their API resources. Authentication is handled by giving the bot access to a Github account which has read/write access to all the repositories it process. However, the bot has to determine which pieces of information are new and which were previously processed. This can be seen as a pull model.
In our case, CS2103 PR Bot employs the interval polling method to retrieve pull requests' information from Github on those repositories that the bot is watching. The bot is currently registered on Github with the handle nus-cs2103-bot. All comments sent from the bot will be shown from that account. The authentication details of the account are currently with Prof Damith and a Github authentication token (env variable GITHUB_TOKEN) is used for automated access to Github. By default, the bot will poll Github every 5 mins (default setting of underlying library).
The bot requires the following in the production environment:
- Node.js v6.3.0 or newer installed
- Internet access (in/out on HTTP/HTTPS)
All Node.js dependencies and their version numbers are described in package.json.
You may find more information about contributing to cs2103-pr-bot in the CONTRIBUTING.md file.
To report a bug, create an issue. Ensure that you search for existing issues reported first before making yours. If it is a possible bug with the underlying library Accuser, create an issue there.
Code released under the MIT license.