Git Mailbot

Git Mailbot sends emails when changes are pushed to a Git repository on Github. This exists because Github's own email service is being deprecated and doesn't include diffs in the emails.

Getting Started

Configure a webhook in your repo's settings on Github:

Payload URL	https://mailbot.csail.mit.edu/webhook
Content type	application/json
Events	Just the push event.
Secret	Ask David or a friend.

If your repo is private, invite the git-mailbot user as a read-only collaborator on your repo. For now, David will have to manually approve the invitation. This process can be streamlined if there is sufficient demand.

In your repo, commit a file called .github/mailbot.json that specifies the recipients and the format of the emails (html or text):

{
  "commitEmailFormat": "html",
  "commitList": "alice@example.com,bob@example.net"
}

Every email from mailbot contains the string 17HFp8KmxqrjXDu3BDa6oRqAGxK1w6WFrE followed by the name of the repo. You can use this to easily filter mailbot emails in Gmail.

Features

Git Mailbot has some advantages over pdos/mailbot:

SSL.
Doesn't require PDOS commit access.
Doesn't leak the names of private repos.
Based on git-multimail which supports HTML emails.
One email per commit.
Easier to filter emails in Gmail.

Future work

Receive emails for other people's repos.
Use deploy keys instead of the git-mailbot machine user.
Gitlab support.