probot/docs/deployment.md

Deploy

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 integration that you can use for your open source project. Use the hosted instance if you don't want to deploy your own.

Contents:

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

Create the GitHub Integration

Every deployment will need an Integration.

1. Create a new GitHub Integration 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.

2. Download the private key from the Integration.

3. Make sure that you click the green Install button on the top left of the integration page. This gives you an option of installing the integration 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:

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

And one of:

• PRIVATE_KEY: the contents of the private key you downloaded after creating the integration, 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 Integration:

1. Make sure you have the Heroku CLI client installed.

2. Clone the plugin that you want to deploy. e.g. git clone https://github.com/probot/stale

3. 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
   

4. Go back to your integration settings page and update the Webhook URL to the URL of your deployment, e.g. http://arcane-lowlands-8408.herokuapp.com/.

5. Configure the Heroku app, replacing the INTEGRATION_ID and WEBHOOK_SECRET with the values for those variables, and setting the path for the PRIVATE_KEY:

    $ heroku config:set INTEGRATION_ID=aaa \
        WEBHOOK_SECRET=bbb \
        PRIVATE_KEY="$(cat ~/Downloads/*.private-key.pem)"
   

6. 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!

Now

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

1. Install the now CLI with npm i -g now

2. Clone the plugin that you want to deploy. e.g. git clone https://github.com/probot/stale

3. Run now to deploy, replacing the INTEGRATION_ID and WEBHOOK_SECRET with the values for those variables, and setting the path for the PRIVATE_KEY:

    $ now -e INTEGRATION_ID=aaa \
        -e WEBHOOK_SECRET=bbb \
        -e PRIVATE_KEY="$(cat ~/Downloads/*.private-key.pem)"
   

4. Once the deploy is started, go back to your integration 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"
   ]
 }
}