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GitHub Bots

Our GitHub repositories are supported by two custom bots:

  • Our Fast Forward Bot, which ensures that commits merged into main are either merged manually on the command line or via a fast-forward, ensuring that cryptographic signatures of commits remain intact. Information on the bot can be found in the ff-bot.yml configuration. Merges over the GitHub UI are discouraged for this reason. You can use it by running /merge on a pull request. Note that attempting to use it without permission to do so will be reported.
  • Our Craig Dazey Emulator Bot, which ensures team morale stays high at all times by thanking team members for submitted pull requests.1

Furthermore, our repositories all have dependabot configured on them.

Dealing with notifications

This section collects some of our team members' ways of dealing with the notifications that originate from our bots.

Sieve (RFC 5228) script

If your mail server supports the Sieve mail filtering language, which it should, you can adapt the following script to customize the amount of notifications you receive:

require ["envelope", "fileinto", "imap4flags"];

if allof (header :is "X-GitHub-Sender" [
              "coveralls", "github-actions[bot]", "render[bot]", "netlify[bot]"
          ],
          address :is "from" "notifications@github.com") {
    setflag "\\seen";
    fileinto "Trash";
    stop;
}
Service Name X-GitHub-Sender Description
Coveralls coveralls Hosted coverage reports on unit tests
GitHub Actions github-actions[bot] Craig Dazey Emulator
Render render[bot] Hosted previews of infra documentation changes
Netlify netlify[bot] Hosted previews of other projects (e.g. site, forms)

If you also want to filter out notifications from renovate, which we use for dependency updates, you can add renovate[bot] to the X-GitHub-Sender list above.

  1. Craig Dazey Emulator Bot stands in no affiliation, direct or indirect, with Craig Dazey. Craig Dazey Emulator Bot. Craig Dazey Emulator Bot is not endorsed by Craig Dazey. Craig Dazey Emulator Bot is an independent project of Craig Dazey. No association is made between Craig Dazey Emulator Bot and Craig Dazey. ↩