1. Get Hooked on Integrations With GitHub
Christopher Thomas
HighEdWeb 2016
10/17/2016

2. #DPA2

3. Intro
» What is Git?
» What is Github?
» GitHub Integrations
» GitHub Webhooks
» Webhook usage at Loma Linda University
» Summary
» Resources
» Questions

4. About Me: Christopher Thomas
» Responsible for tools and technologies used to develop web apps at Loma
Linda University
» For many years, active in the web community through contributions
» SoCal born and raised!
» Marathon runner

5. About Loma Linda University (LLU)
» Location: 1 hour from Los Angeles
» Students: 4,500+
» Programs: 100+
» Schools: 8
» Ownership: Privately owned by the Seventh-Day-Adventist Church
» Mission: “To continue the teaching and healing ministry of Jesus Christ”
» Other facts:
~ Institution mainly focused on health sciences at the graduate level
~ City of Loma Linda is the only Blue Zone in the country
~ No mascot, but “Good Samaritan” statue is an unofficial proxy
~ Institution is a part of a 6 hospital 1,000+ bed health system

6. What is Git?
» Source code version control
» Developed by Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux
» Distributed
» Full history of commits are in each copy of the repository
» Users can make commits without being connected to the network
» Can work without a main/central repository

7. What is GitHub?
» A git server / git repository hosting site
» Has arguably the best web based UI of all git server solutions
» Easily allows users to share code and to collaborate
» Largest git repository hosting site
» Comes in two versions
~ Cloud based (github.com)
~ On premise, VM appliance (GitHub Enterprise)

8. What are Integrations and Webhooks?
» Events in GitHub are broadcasted
» Integrations are predefined event broadcasts to a specific vendor solution
» Webhooks are user setup HTTP requests

9. Types of Events
» Fork
» Branch
» Issues (opened, closed, comments, assigned)
» Push
» Team (add, edit memberships, delete, etc..)
» Merge

10. Integrations
» GitHub has over 70 predefined integrations
» Lots of popular apps and services are on the list
» Very little configuration needed to set up
» Not all events are broadcasted for each integration
» GitHub.com calls them integrations, GitHub Enterprise calls them services

11. Integrations
» Project Management
~ JIRA
» Continuous Integration
~ TravisCI
~ Jenkins / Hudson (plugin needed)
» Communication
~ #Slack
~ HipChat
» Other

12. Your Integration / Vendor Service Not
on List?
» Options:
~ Integrations Early Access Program
~ Webhooks

13. Integrations Early Access Program
» Used to be able to submit a Pull Request to submit an integration
» Process recently changed to the integrations early access program
» More formal process
» Inclusion requirements more clearly stated than in the past

14. Webhooks

15. Webhooks
» Best when the integration you need can’t be handled by something in the
integrations directory or eligible for the integrations early access program;
when you need a custom integration
» GitHub sends a HTTP POST request to a specified URL
» POST body contains data about the event in either JSON or form data
format
» Can set up via settings webpage or via GitHub’s API
» Can trigger webhook for all events or certain type of events

17. Case study
Webhooks usage at Loma Linda University

18. Administrative Systems Department
» Consists of roughly two dozen people with a mixture of programmer /
business / application analysts and managers.
» “We write the programs that run the University”
» Develop mostly for the web using PHP for an in-house developed platform
» Everyone in department has ability to push code to production

19. MyLLU Portal
» Web portal that serves the entire enterprise
» Dozens of apps
» 100,000s of lines of PHP code
» Two instances of portal (internal vs external apps)
» Types of apps:
~ Admissions committee tools
~ Collaboration tools
~ Finance tools
~ Identity management tools
~ Job board
~ Student forms workflow processing
~ Training requirements tracker

20. Developer Workflow
» Initial steps:
~ Developer forks main repository
~ Clones repo in their account
~ Adds main repository as a remote (upstream)
» Development steps:
~ Create feature branch and push to origin, if working with others
~ Make code changes
~ Test on local VM
~ Commit Changes
~ Merge Changes back to master
~ Push master to upstream

21. MyLLU Deployment Process
» Before Git / GitHub
~ Developers would FTP files to production servers
~ Sometimes process would take minuets if code was in separate
directories
~ Potential app downtime while code is copied to servers
» After Git / GitHub
~ Webhook used to initiate code deployment
~ Code copied to servers in seconds
~ Minimized potential app downtime while code is copied

22. MyLLU Deployment Process
» Developer pushes code (upstream) to repository in our GitHub Enterprise
instance
» GitHub triggers the webhook, which contacts the intermediate server
» Intermediate server pulls changes from GitHub to a local repo
» Intermediate pushes code from local repo to production web servers
» Intermediate server sends notice to all developers with commits in the push
that their changes have been published

23. MyLLU Deployment Process

24. Intermediate Server
» Had to do for network policy reasons (not necessary in most enviroments)
» Dedicated account used to process GitHub webhook
» Must create SSH key pair so server can pull code from GitHub Enterprise
and push code to production servers
» Add newly created public key to GitHub as a deploy key

25. Deploy Key

26. Production Servers
» Process based on Evanto Tuts+ article “Setting Up A Staging Environment”
» Have a separate account just for the webhook process
» SSH keys so intermediate server can connect
» Two git repos
~ Bare repo in git process home repo
~ Regular repo in the webroot

27. Summary
» GitHub was built to integrate with other systems
» Many predefined integrations for lots of vendor systems
» Can ask for new intergration to be added through a formal process
» Custom integrations can be done through webhooks
» Loma Linda has leveraged webhooks to deploy code to its portal platform

28. Resources
» GitHub Integrations Directory
~ https://github.com/integrations
» GitHub Early Access Integrations
~ https://developer.github.com/early-access/integrations/
» Setting Up a Staging Environment
~ https://code.tutsplus.com/articles/setting-up-a-staging-environment--net-29738
» Webhooks API Docs
~ https://developer.github.com/v3/repos/hooks/

29. Questions

30. #DPA2