GotFixed

This gem provides an engine to help communicate to your users when issues they report get fixed, given that your issue tracker is private. It extend your web application with a public dashboard of your issue tracker.

As of this first version, only Github private repositories are supported. All issues with a specific tag (e.g. public) will be fetched and exposed in the dashboard. Once the engine is set up, you'll get a new page:

http://myawesomeapp.com/got_fixed

There is a live demo hosted on Heroku. Source code is ssaunier/got_fixed_demo.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem "got_fixed"

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Install GotFixed into your application with the following.

$ bundle exec rails g got_fixed:install

It will add a route to config/routes.rb mounting the got_fixed engine, and create the following files:

.
|-- app
|   `-- views
|       |-- got_fixed
|           |-- issues
|           |   |-- index.html.erb
|           |   `-- subscribe.js.erb
|           `-- user_mailer
|               `-- issue_got_fixed_email.text.erb
`-- config
    `-- got_fixed.yml

GotFixed uses ActiveRecord to store issues and subscribers. Install migrations with the following:

$ bundle exec rake got_fixed:install:migrations
$ bundle exec rake db:migrate

Now let's perform some manual steps to configure GotFixed:

1. Open config/routes.rb and check that the mounting point suits your need. By default it's /got_fixed.
2. Open config/got_fixed.yml and configure which GitHub repositories you want to expose in the dashboard. For each repo, you can set up a list of tags to whitelist which issue you want to disclose in the dashboard. If this list is empty, GotFixed will expost all issues.
3. Open the three views created to customize the dashboard, and the email your users will receive.

To help with this view editing, we'll need some issues. You can import GitHub issues from repos you configured in config/got_fixed.yml with the following command:

$ bundle exec rake got_fixed:import_github

You should now be able to run your application and view some issues at localhost:3000/got_fixed.

$ bundle exec rails s

If you followed carefully all the steps described in the Install section, you should have a great dashboard branded to your product. It's time to push it to production. Let's assume you host your app on Heroku. If you don't, please extrapolate, you should get the main idea.

$ git push heroku master
$ heroku run bundle exec rake db:migrate

You can seed the dashboard issue database with the following rake command you already ran in development:

$ heroku run bundle exec rake got_fixed:import_github

You may ask, should I run this every time I want to update the dashboard? Should I setup a cron job? No! There is a better solution, using Github post-receive-hooks. GotFixed comes with a simple rake task you can run to setup this webhook.

$ heroku run bundle exec rake got_fixed:register_github_webhook

You're ready! Now every time an issue with relevant labels is created, it will appear on the dashboard a few seconds later. You can then email your user with a link to the dashboard and tell them they can register their email address to be notified once this issue is closed.

Be careful, the email will be sent as soon as the issue is closed, so this whole notification thing only makes sense if you practise continous deployment.