Hexabat

Hexabat is a Github issues importer tool for Ruby.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'hexabat'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install hexabat

The Github issues API is nice, but if you try to get all the issues of a project you will have a hard time. You will need to query page by page and get open and closed issues separately.

Also, if you want to find out the total number of issues, there is no easy way of doing it. You can find out the amount of open issues through the repositories API but, where are the closed ones?

Hexabat tackles those two problems by providing an easy way of importing the issues of a Github repository:

Hexabat.on_issue_retrieved do |issue|
  puts "issue ##{issue['number']} imported"
end

Hexabat.on_issue_count_known do |count|
  puts "The repository has #{count} issues"
end

Hexabat.on_error do |repo, status, message|
  STDERR.puts "Failed to import #{repo} due to #{status}: #{message}"
end

Hexabat.import 'rails/rails'

That means that Hexabat will allow you to:

• Find out the total number of issues (both open and closed) of the repository.
• Do something with the data of every issue in the repository (i.e. store it in a database). You can check the JSON returned by github on the github api documentation. The only thing Hexabat does is parsing this JSON and yield the issues to the callback one by one.
• Handle importing errors properly (i.e. store the error reason in a database).

You don't need set every single callback if you don't want to. You can setup only one callback if that's what you need. We also provide a default errback that will print to STDERR a message with the failure (pretty similar to the example above).

###Authentication

If you are importing a public repository's issues you don't need to authenticate:

Hexabat.import 'rails/rails'

If you want to import issues on behalf of a user you authenticated with OAuth you can use her token in order to do it:

Hexabat.import 'path11/private_repo', token: auth_token

Hexabat runs on top of EventMachine.

You can use it inside a running event loop:

EM.run do
  Hexabat.on_issue_retrieved   { |issue| puts "issue ##{issue['number']} imported" }
  Hexabat.on_issue_count_known { |count| puts "The repository has #{count} issues" }
  Hexabat.import 'rails/rails' # this won't start an event loop
end

Hexabat will start the event loop for you if you call it outside a running one.

No it doesn't. Given that Hexabat doesn't know the work you are going to do with each of the issues it doesn't know when it's work will be done. For example: if you use em-mongo to store each issue Hexabat can't know when each of those callbacks is done.

It's your job to sync them up and stop the event loop.

There are a few tweaks and improvements that we want to add to Hexabat:

• Being able to provide an OAuth tokens, and keys so you can authorize your application without the need of a user OAuth token.

After that we have a few more things planned but that will be a surprise.