Tenter

Tenter is a Sinatra-based web application that provides webhooks for use by GitHub.

Webhooks offer the promise of being able to execute arbitrary actions in response to events occurring in a GitHub Repository. Sounds amazing. Except who's going to set up a server to receive each request, confirm its authenticity and then process it appropriately?

Tenter makes that all easy. Tenter runs on any Rack-compatible server and exposes a simple URL in the form of /run/<command>/in/<directory>. An authenticated POST request to this URL will cause Tenter to execute the command at /<doc_root>/<directory>/commands/<command>. The defaults are all sane but you can customise them as you please.

Enough jibber jabber. Let's get to the action.

Tenter is available as a gem:

$ gem install tenter

Now create a config.ru file in the directory where you'll run Tenter:

require "tenter"

run Tenter::Hooks

The final step:

$ rackup

And you're off to the races.

The easiest way to understand how Tenter works is to first imagine a directory structure like this:

doc/
├─root/
│ ├─my_dir/
│ │ ├─commands/
│ │ │ ├─my_action
│ │ ├─log/
│ │ ├─hooks.yaml

By setting up Tenter to listen on a particular domain (eg. example.org) and to treat /doc/root as the document root, we expose a webhook that will allow my_action to be run by sending a POST request to http://example.org/run/my_action/in/my_dir/.

Tenter adopts convention over configuration as much as possible.

The only thing you need to set is the secret in each exposed directory's hooks.yaml file. When you set up the webhook in your GitHub repository's settings, GitHub will ask you for this secret. GitHub will use the secret to sign its POST requests and it's this signature that Tenter validates before running commands.

Of course, if you want, you can tweak the following settings as you please:

• :doc_root (default: "/var/www"): The root directory in which each exposed directory will be located. It's recommended to specify this as an absolute path.

• :config_filename (default: "hooks.yaml"): The filename of the configuration file in each exposed directory.

• :command_dir (default: "commands"): The name of the subdirectory holding the commands for each exposed directory.

• :log_file (default "log/commands.log"): The path to the log file in each exposed directory where output from your commands will be logged. You can set this to nil to disable logging.

To change these settings, simply assign a hash with the defaults you want to change in your config.ru file:

require "tenter"

Tenter.settings = { log_file: nil } # disable logging

run Tenter::Hooks

Tenter does not currently provide the ability to use different settings for different exposed directories. If you want that kind of fine-grained control, you can run multiple instances of Tenter.

Found a bug? I'd love to know about it. The best way is to report them in the Issues section on GitHub.

Tenter uses Semantic Versioning 2.0.0.

Tenter is released into the public domain. See LICENSE.md for more details.