sink

One webhook to rule them all.

Often times, an organization will have multiple directories on a web server that need to be synced to individual GitHub repositories. Ideally, these directories would support some sort of Continuous Deployment as well. Toss in different branches with something like git flow and maintaining webhooks can get unruly pretty fast.

This repository aims to provide a one-stop-shop for all of your GitHub webhooks, relying on server-side config to keep different directories synced up with different branches on different repositories. With the recent addition of organization-wide webhooks, administrators will ideally only need one webhook to keep all of their directories in "sink".

Basic Usage

1. In some accessible directory on your web server, clone down sink. For example:

   cd /var/www
   git clone https://github.com/mattdodge/sink.git

2. Copy config.ini.example to config.ini and modify its contents to match your desired implementation. See the wiki for more documentation on configuration options.

   Be sure to change your SECRET_PHRASE, you will need it in the next step.

3. From your GitHub organization or from an individual repo, add a webhook to point to your recently cloned sync directory. Following up on our previous example:

   • Payload URL: http://yourhost.com/sink/
   • Content-Type: application/json
   • Secret: The secret phrase you configured in step 2

Adding a sink

If you want to keep a directory on your web server synced with a branch of a remote repository, it's as easy as adding this to your config.ini

[live site]
  GITHUB_ACCOUNT = mattdodge
  GITHUB_REPO = sink
  GITHUB_BRANCH = master
  DIRECTORY = "/var/www/homepage"

Why?

A couple of different things inspired this script, if you can relate to any of these, sink may be for you.

• More and more web servers are coming with SSH access and git installed on them. Might as well make use of them!

• I normally find myself having multiple web apps on a single web server. I also like to version control each web app in a separate repository. Frankly, I just got really tired of running the following commands over and over and over

  ssh matt@webserver
  cd path/to/webappD
  git pull

• It's pretty easy to add a simple endpoint that cd's into the directory, and then pull the code down. The problem is you have to add a webhook to each repository and keep track of them all. This is what I used to do, but I never liked how it would pull down on every push to every branch.

• Like I mentioned earlier, I'm a huge proponent of git flow. I wanted a way to keep my staging servers in sync with my develop branch and my production servers in sync with master without having different scripts and different webhooks.

• CI tools typically integrate pretty easily with GitHub, but they are really too heavy for what you normally need just when syncing a repo.

Documentation

Check out more documentation about the configuration options in the Documentation Wiki.

Examples

We've got a couple of cool examples of using sink in the Examples Wiki

License

MIT - you know the drill, blah blah blah