Building Tools with GitHub

Chapter 8. CoffeeScript, Hubot, and the Activity API

Though the phrase has now been removed from its marketing materials, GitHub used to call itself a tool for “social coding.” This idea is still central to the services GitHub provides—intimate access to the social layer inside of GitHub through the Activity API.

In this chapter we’ll investigate the Activity API by extending a chat robot. You might find it odd that a robot, generally considered an antisocial invention despite all best attempts, would play nicely with a social API, but this is a social robot. GitHubbers use an extensible chat robot called Hubot to record and automate their tasks, and to have fun on the Internet. If there were any robot suited for interacting with the GitHub Activity API, it’s Hubot, described on the site https://hubot.github.com/ as “a customizable, kegerator-powered life embetterment robot.”

The Activity API

The Activity API includes:

• Notifications (comments issued to users through various events)

• Stargazing tools (Facebook has “likes” while GitHub has “stars” to indicate approval or interest)

• Watching (a way to track GitHub data)

• Events (a higher-level activity stream useful for following actions of users)

The Activity API section also includes feeds. While feeds are grouped within the Activity API, they are not programmatic in the same way an API is, and we won’t cover them in depth here. Feeds are actually Atom feeds and not interactive beyond that. Atom feeds are similar to RSS ...