octokit.js VS smee-client

You can fetch different kinds of data with GitHub's API. There are two options: use the API directly or the Octokit.js library (this is the route GitHub recommends). I decided to use the API directly since the Octokit.js library included extra stuff I wouldn't need, which is an overkill for this use case.

The package @actions/github provides a hydrated Octokit.js client. Octokit.js is the SDK of GitHub and contains several subpackages like @octokit/rest and @octokit/graphql to interact with the REST or GraphQL API.

While sharing my project on Twitter, I got to know of Gregor Martynus, the maintainer of the JavaScript Octokit – GitHub's official JavaScript SDK and his project Octoherd. He tweeted a reply that it will be nice to have a GUI like Octokit-lite for Octoherd, and that sparked an inspiration for me ✨

I've also added an example using Octokit.js, GitHub's JS/TS client to the API.

In order for the project to be shipped as a service function, the node environment can not be used in any of the production code. Reviewing Probot source, one might see a dead end in that it uses require("dotenv").config(). However, its underlying framework, OctoKit does not come with any opinionated code in this regard.

Hey, I've been using Octokit in NestJS for interacting with GitHub's API and today I moved it out into a separate NPM package.

Well, that will require a change in the smee-client as well. So maybe a follow-up?

Neat stuff - certainly this problem crops up quite a lot where an internal server needs to get GitHub webhook data.

In the past, I've had good luck using a webhook proxy. I've mostly just used https://smee.io/ which is simple and lightweight although seems to be mostly abandonware at this point. I dockerized it so that it could be used in a Kubernetes cluster, which was very useful for my GitHub Actions build cluster: https://github.com/ethomson/smee-client

There's also Hookdeck, which I haven't used in production, but have played around with, and it seems conceptually the same, but can be made more Enterprisey. Whether that's a bug or a feature is probably up to you.

Using the same probot/smee-client shipped by Probot we divert the webhook URL to one on localhost for the development application, and for the production application we will enter a custom route.