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docs/best-practices.md

Deployment

Every plugin can either be deployed as a stand-alone bot, or combined with other plugins in one deployment.

Heads up! Note that most plugins in the @probot organization have an official hosted app that you can use for your open source project. Use the hosted instance if you don't want to deploy your own.

Contents:

Create the GitHub App
Deploy the plugin
1. Heroku
2. Now
Combining plugins

Create the GitHub App

Every deployment will need an App.

Create a new GitHub App with:
- Homepage URL: the URL to the GitHub repository for your plugin
- Webhook URL: Use https://example.com/ for now, we'll come back in a minute to update this with the URL of your deployed plugin.
- Webhook Secret: Generate a unique secret with openssl rand -base64 32 and save it because you'll need it in a minute to configure your deployed plugin.
- Permissions & events: See docs/deploy.md in the plugin for a list of the permissions and events that it needs access to.
Download the private key from the app.
Make sure that you click the green Install button on the top left of the app page. This gives you an option of installing the app on all or a subset of your repositories.

Deploy the plugin

To deploy a plugin to any cloud provider, you will need 3 environment variables:

APP_ID: the ID of the app, which you can get from the app settings page.
WEBHOOK_SECRET: the Webhook Secret that you generated when you created the app.

And one of:

PRIVATE_KEY: the contents of the private key you downloaded after creating the app, OR...
PRIVATE_KEY_PATH: the path to a private key file.

PRIVATE_KEY takes precedence over PRIVATE_KEY_PATH.

Heroku

Probot runs like any other Node app on Heroku. After creating the GitHub App:

Make sure you have the Heroku CLI client installed.
Clone the plugin that you want to deploy. e.g. git clone https://github.com/probot/stale

Create the Heroku app with the heroku create command:

 $ heroku create
 Creating arcane-lowlands-8408... done, stack is cedar
 http://arcane-lowlands-8408.herokuapp.com/ | git@heroku.com:arcane-lowlands-8408.git
 Git remote heroku added

Go back to your app settings page and update the Webhook URL to the URL of your deployment, e.g. http://arcane-lowlands-8408.herokuapp.com/.
Configure the Heroku app, replacing the APP_ID and WEBHOOK_SECRET with the values for those variables, and setting the path for the PRIVATE_KEY:
```
 $ heroku config:set APP_ID=aaa \
     WEBHOOK_SECRET=bbb \
     PRIVATE_KEY="$(cat ~/Downloads/*.private-key.pem)"
```

Deploy the plugin to heroku with git push:

 $ git push heroku master
 ...
 -----> Node.js app detected
 ...
 -----> Launching... done
       http://arcane-lowlands-8408.herokuapp.com deployed to Heroku

Your plugin should be up and running! To verify that your plugin is receiving webhook data, you can tail your app's logs:
```
 $ heroku config:set LOG_LEVEL=trace
 $ heroku logs --tail
```

Now

Zeit Now is a great service for running Probot plugins. After creating the GitHub App:

Install the now CLI with npm i -g now
Clone the plugin that you want to deploy. e.g. git clone https://github.com/probot/stale
Run now to deploy, replacing the APP_ID and WEBHOOK_SECRET with the values for those variables, and setting the path for the PRIVATE_KEY:
```
 $ now -e APP_ID=aaa \
     -e WEBHOOK_SECRET=bbb \
     -e PRIVATE_KEY="$(cat ~/Downloads/*.private-key.pem)"
```
Once the deploy is started, go back to your app settings page and update the Webhook URL to the URL of your deployment (which now has kindly copied to your clipboard).

Your plugin should be up and running!

Combining plugins

To deploy a bot that includes multiple plugins, create a new app that has the plugins listed as dependencies in package.json:

{
  "name": "my-probot",
  "private": true,
  "dependencies": {
    "probot-autoresponder": "probot/autoresponder",
    "probot-configurer": "probot/configurer"
  },
  "scripts": {
    "start": "probot run"
 },
 "probot": {
   "plugins": [
     "probot-autoresponder",
     "probot-configurer"
   ]
 }
}

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