GitHub pro tips

Post-commit hooks

You can use github post commit hooks to send an HTTP payload to a server after every commit. The payload will contain data about the commit that you can then use to trigger arbitrary actions (e.g. run scripts) on the server.

I’ve used a simple go library webhook to do this. To get it up and running I did the following:

1. Install webhook with: go get github.com/adnanh/webhook
2. Configure a post-commit webhook on github by:
   • Going to the repository settings then «Webhooks and services»
   • Clicking «Add webook»
   • Enter http://SERVER-IP:9000/hooks/HOOK-ID, where SERVER-IP is the ip address of the server and HOOK-ID is the name of a hook I will use in the next step
   • Enter a «password» in the secret field. Will be used later
3. Create a hooks.json file with the contents of this example. In the example HOOK-ID is given by the "id" field in the only element of the JSON array.
4. Change the execute-command to the script I want to run and command-working-directory to where I want ro run the script (also change the secret to what I chose in step 2)
5. Run $GOPATH/bin/webhook -hooks hooks.json -verbose to start the server (assumes $GOPATH is set properly)

That’s it! Now, every time we push a commit to master the script runs locally on our machine.

Note that if we kill the process running webhook the hooks won’t work anymore. I start the server on a remote machine using nohup and &. The actual command I used was

nohup $GOPATH/bin/webhook -hooks hooks.json -verbose > webhook.out 2> webhook.err < /dev/null &

See the example hook.json file here

Jupyter notebooks in gists

Here’s what I do to put a notebook in a gist:

1. Go here https://gist.github.com
2. Create a new public gist
3. Name the file my_notebook.ipynb and write ​_something_​ in it.
4. Once the gist has been created and you are viewing it click the url and copy the big long string at the end. It could look like 82e0defcbddb09dd021df771bcf5a4b6
5. Clone the gist as a repo to your computer using git clone git@gist.github.com:BIGLONGSTRING.git notebook_gist where BIGLONGSTRING is the thing from step 4 and notebook_gist is the name of the folder on your comptuer
6. Copy your actual notebook into notebook_gist folder, then add, commit, push like normal
7. After pushing go to nbviewer and paste BIGLONGSTRING into the seach box on their site. This should load up the notebook from your gist and you’re done!

To update the notebook, simply put a new version of it into that notebook_gist repo, commit, and push. The changes should go live on nbviewer.

If you aren’t seeing an updated version of the notebook after pushing to the gist repo, you might need to visit the url in private mode or reset the browser cache.

Checking out pull requests

This gist explains how to add to the .git/config file inside a git repo so you can check out pull requests from the remote as if they were branches on the remote.

The tl;dr version is add the following to the file .git/config within your repo:

fetch = +refs/pull/*/head:refs/remotes/origin/pr/*

where origin is the name of the remote.

Then you can do git fetch origin and git checkout pr/XX where XX is the pull request number.