triagebot

Triagebot

This is the triage and team assistance bot for the rust-lang organization.

Please see the forge for our documentation, and feel free to contribute edits if you find something helpful!

How triagebot works

Triagebot consists of a webserver with several endpoints. The /github-hook and /zulip-hook endpoints receive webhook notifications from the respective services. Triagebot can then respond to those notifications to perform various actions such as adjusting labels.

The Triagebot webserver also includes several other endpoints intended for users to access directly, such as https://triage.rust-lang.org/agenda.

Triagebot uses a Postgres database to retain some state. In production, it uses RDS.

The server at https://triage.rust-lang.org/ runs on ECS and is configured via Terraform. Updates are automatically deployed when merged to master.

Installation

To compile the Triagebot you need OpenSSL development library to be installed (e.g. for Ubuntu-like Linux distributions sudo apt install libssl-dev).

Run cargo build to compile the triagebot.

Running triagebot

It is possible to run triagebot yourself, and test changes against your own repository. Some developers may settle with testing in production as the risks tend to be low, but the more intrepid may find it easier to iterate separately.

The general overview of what you will need to do:

1. Create a repo on GitHub to run tests on.
2. Configure a database
3. Configure webhook forwarding

4. Configure the .env file:

   1. Copy .env.sample to .env
   2. GITHUB_API_TOKEN: This is a token needed for Triagebot to send requests to GitHub. Go to GitHub Settings > Developer Settings > Personal Access Token, and create a new token. The repo permission should be sufficient. If this is not set, Triagebot will also look in ~/.gitconfig in the github.oauth-token setting.
   3. DATABASE_URL: This is the URL to the database. See Configuring a database.
   4. GITHUB_WEBHOOK_SECRET: Enter the secret you entered in the webhook above.
   5. RUST_LOG: Set this to debug.

5. Run cargo run --bin triagebot. This starts the http server listening for webhooks on port 8000.

6. Add a triagebot.toml file to the main branch of your GitHub repo with whichever services you want to try out.

7. Try interacting with your repo, such as issuing @rustbot commands or interacting with PRs and issues (depending on which services you enabled in triagebot.toml). Watch the logs from the server to see what's going on.

Configure a database

To use Postgres, you will need to install it and configure it:

1. Install Postgres. Look online for any help with installing and setting up Postgres (particularly if you need to create a user and set up permissions).
2. Create a database: createdb triagebot

3. In the .env file, set the DATABASE_URL:

   DATABASE_URL=postgres://eric@localhost/triagebot
   

replacing eric with the username on your local system.

Configure webhook forwarding

I recommend at least skimming the GitHub webhook documentation if you are not familiar with webhooks. In order for GitHub's webhooks to reach your triagebot server, you'll need to figure out some way to route them to your machine. There are various options on how to do this. You can poke holes into your firewall or use a proxy, but you shouldn't expose your machine to the the internet. There are various services which help with this problem. These generally involve running a program on your machine that connects to an external server which relays the hooks into your machine. There are several to choose from:

• gh webhook — This is a GitHub-native service. This is the easiest to use.
• ngrok — This is pretty easy to use, but requires setting up a free account.
• https://smee.io/ — This is another service recommended by GitHub.
• https://localtunnel.github.io/www/ — This is another service recommended by GitHub.

gh webhook

The gh CLI is the official CLI tool which I highly recommend getting familiar with. There is an official extension which provides webhook forwarding and also takes care of all the configuration. See cli/gh-webhook for more information on installing it.

This is super easy to use, and doesn't require manually configuring webhook settings. The command to run looks something like:

gh webhook forward --repo=ehuss/triagebot-test --events=* \
  --url=http://127.0.0.1:8000/github-hook --secret somelongsekrit

Where the value in --secret is the secret value you place in GITHUB_WEBHOOK_SECRET in the .env file, and --repo is the repo you want to test against.

ngrok

The following is an example of using https://ngrok.com/ to provide webhook forwarding. You need to sign up for a free account, and also deal with configuring the GitHub webhook settings.

1. Install ngrok.
2. Run ngrok http 8000. This will forward webhook events to localhost on port 8000.

3. Configure GitHub webhooks in the test repo you created. In short:

   1. Go to the settings page for your GitHub repo.
   2. Go to the webhook section.
   3. Click "Add webhook"

   4. Include the settings:

      • Payload URL: This is the URL to your Triagebot server, for example http://7e9ea9dc.ngrok.io/github-hook. This URL is displayed when you ran the ngrok command above.
      • Content type: application/json
      • Secret: Enter a shared secret (some longish random text)
      • Events: "Send me everything"

License

Triagebot is distributed under the terms of both the MIT license and the Apache License (Version 2.0).

See LICENSE-APACHE and LICENSE-MIT for details.