GitHub commit-email-bot

commit-email-bot sends emails when changes are pushed to a Git repository on Github.

Getting started

Install the commit-emails GitHub app

In your repo, commit a file called .github/commit-emails.toml that specifies the recipients and the format of the emails (the default is html, text is also supported)

to = "alice@example.com,bob@example.net"

[email]
format = "html"

Every email from commit-email-bot contains the string jD27HVpTX3tELRBjcpGsK6io7 followed by the name of the repo. You can use this to easily filter commit emails in Gmail.

Deploying

Create a Digital Ocean droplet and a volume. Clone the repo on the droplet. Mount the created volume (following Digital Ocean's instructions to get its UUID) to /root/commit-email-bot/persist.

You'll need to point the commit-emails.xyz domain to the droplet: configure NameCheap's A record to the droplet's public IPv4 address.

Install docker:

sudo apt install -y docker.io docker-compose-v2 docker-buildx

A 512MB virtual machine runs out of memory when building, but not when running, so make sure to configure some swap space:

sudo fallocate -l 2G /swapfile
sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile
echo '/swapfile none swap sw 0 0' | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab

Copy the private key for the production secrets in .env.production:

rsync .env.keys root@commit-emails.xyz:./commit-email-bot/

Building the container on the droplet is difficult. You can build it locally and push it:

docker buildx build -t tchajed/commit-email-bot:latest . --platform linux/amd64
docker push tchajed/commit-email-bot:latest

Then pull the image and run the container:

docker pull tchajed/commit-email-bot:latest
dotenvx run -f .env.keys -- docker compose up

Future work

• Expose a branch filter option
• Clean up old cloned repos to free up space.
• Upgrade to a paid Mailgun account to support a wider audience.

Acknowledgment

Based on David's git-mailbot.