« Tools

First published: September 2017

@IonicReleases - An Ionic Github Releases Twitter bot

Ionic development is distributed to lots of libraries and repositories. It also tends to move very fast at times, with simultaneous releases of different parts. This can make it quite challenging to know what is going on and to find about about new releases or bugfixes in a reasonable time.

That’s why I created the Twitter account @IonicReleases that tweets each time a new release for any of the important repositories on Github gets tagged and released:

Tweets by IonicReleases

How it works

The bot is a combination of features from Github, Zapier and Integromat:

1. At Zapier a “Zap” combines a list of Github releases RSS feeds (e.g. ionic-team/ionic/releases.atom, ionic-team/ionic-native/releases.atom) into one big RSS feed and publishes it.
2. Then at Integromat a “Scenario” retrieves this feed. If there are new items it composes a string out of the available data (repository name, which is not directly available in the RSS feed) and combines it with other available data from the RSS feed to a tweet text, mentioning the repository that got the release and linking to the release notes. It then sends that text as a tweet (and and email directly to me) at the @IonicReleases account:

New "Ionic" Release: 3.5.3 https://t.co/nY7bbz32Ru

— Ionic Releases (@IonicReleases) July 14, 2017</blockquote>

I had to combine Zapier and Integromat to get this functionality working as both only have part of the required features. Nice side effect is that both services can handle that with their free accounts.

---

« Tools

First published: September 2017