Show HN: GitHub Notifier – Emails for stars/forks your repos and new followers | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: GitHub Notifier – Emails for stars/forks your repos and new followers

githubnotifier.io

36 pointsUsu23 comments

    > This application will be able to read and write all user data.

Fix your permissions please, sounds useful but no way are you being granted full read/write to personal and organization repos.

Ugh. Nice find, I'll fix that asap!

Actually after looking into it the current permissions are:

Grants read/write access to profile info only. Note that this scope includes user:email and user:follow.

Still too broad, but it doesn't give access to repos. I will change it to only user:email as soon as I get off my daily job.

Github shoukd rename it into "profile data" then. "User data" seems easy to misinterpret.

It's been a while since I tested it, but I believe that reading public info like stars and following/followers requires no scopes. I only needed that scope for writing. May be worth checking out?

Yeah, i was about to sign up but didn't because it was asking for too much permission.

I fixed the issue :)

Would it be possible to have it access only your personal profile data? The permissions screen shows an Organization Access section with all my orgs checked.

Unfortunately I can't exclude organisation altogether, GitHub applications have access to organisation with the permissions that the user has allowed the app. However now GitHub Notifier only asks for read permissions :)

I created this because I was frustrated with losing interesting events happening on GitHub (GitHub doesn't send you emails when somebody stars or forks one of your repositories or follows/unfollows you). It started out as a simple script that sent me an email, but then I thought that maybe this was something that other people could find useful, so I turned it into a website, picking up ruby again after a long time in the process. You can find the code on GitHub: https://github.com/andreausu/github-notifier (it's not pretty, I know)

Don’t you have all these info on your GitHub homepage? While this project seems interesting for some people, I don’t get why would you want an email when someone stars your project. I’ve a project with 600+ stars, I’m glad I didn’t receive 600+ emails.

You do have all this in your timeline, but mine is really cluttered with all the notifications from my main job's organisation and it's easy to lose interesting stuff happening on my repos. About the email frequency, you can choose to only receive a daily or weekly report.

Thanks, the weekly report is a great thing!

Well, I don't :) If you have smaller projects it helps with the motivation to see that people are interested enough to star it, even if it are only 4.

I'd find this really helpful if I could select particular repositories. I have a lot of repositories, but I'm only this interested in a couple of them (mostly the thing I'm working on right at this moment).

This is probably not that easy, but I would also be interested in forks where someone made a first commit. Lots of people fork and never commit, I think as a kind of stickier star, but I'm much more interested in people who actually do something with the code.

Also, seems like there's no way to turn it off? I just turned off all the notification events instead.

Thank you for the feedback, I will put in Trello for possible future development.

You're right, atm you have to unselect all the notifications to stop receiving emails (however if you click unsubscribe from an email there's a button that does that without manually clicking).

Wow, as someone who just made their first public repo I can't believe GitHub doesn't already offer this. Great idea considering I've been checking my profile constantly to see if anyone's starred or followed me. With that being said, trust is my biggest barrier to entry right now. I'd be devastated if using this somehow affected my repos.

Thanks for the feedback! I fixed the too broad permissions issue, now the app only asks for read permissions :)

How instant alerts work? Do you check for changes every minute? Or you use Github web hooks and they trigger your services whenever someone stars/forks?

I check every minute.

also for osx: http://questbe.at/pophub/

nice one

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