Dinghy digests

Sunday 13 March 2022

Dinghy is a tool I wrote to summarize activity on GitHub issues and pull requests. You configure it to look at certain GitHub resources over a recent time period, and it produces a compact digest of what’s been happening:

A sample Dinghy digest

I started dinghy because I needed a way to see disparate activity in repos at work, and it’s been useful for that. So far it has the features I’ve needed. Maybe others will find it useful too.

It was also a chance to dig into the GitHub GraphQL API. GraphQL syntax is oddly strict (why can’t I define a fragment that isn’t used?), and GitHub’s implementation has quirks (sometimes requesting data with the wrong token scope is an error, other times it returns None). I can see the advantage of being able to request a graph of data with one request rather than a REST API that forces me to walk the graph myself, but paginating along multiple axes is still a pain (listing issues, and also comments on issues).

The code is still a mess in some places, and I haven’t figured out how to test most of it. But it was interesting to reverse engineer how GitHub decides on the text color for labels (they compute it in CSS!)

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