Make probot usable with RunKit

Feature Request - probot in RunKit

Users want to use probot with RunKit instead of self-hosted NodeJS or platforms like Glitch

Background

RunKit notebooks are interactive javascript playgrounds connected to a complete node environment right in your browser. Every npm module pre-installed. RunKit can host any notebook as an endpoint if required.

Solution

Add a method for starting probot from within a RunKit Notebook (start probot from inside JavaScript code, instead of from the command line)

This might already be possible by using the .createProbot method or the .start, although I doubt it by inspecting the structure of the probot object/class.

I would propose a .createEndpoint method for probot. That method would create an importable endpoint for either NodeJS itself or even framework like express. The following code shows the proposed method in action.

A: (using pure NodeJS)

var probot = require("probot");

exports.endpoint = probot.createEndpoint(app => {
  // your `probot` code here
}, options)

B: (using ExpressJS)

var probot = require("probot");
var express = require("@runkit/runkit/express-endpoint/1.0.0");
var app = express(exports);

app.use(probot.createEndpoint(app => {
  // your `probot` code here
}, options));

The first argument would be the standard app function that is passed to the export for probot. The second argument would be an options object containing the same options that the probot-run script can take.

The introduced method should ideally return an object with the same signature as the callback passed to server.listen in NodeJS directly. The only change here is removing the explicit server creation and port binding.

Teachability, Documentation, Adoption, Migration Strategy The change should not be too complex for someone very versed with the project. No migration required as only functionality is added.

[JasonEtco]

I did a quick test to see if this works correctly now; using @tcbyrd’s code example but with a newer version of Probot, I was able to see errors in actual Probot code:

This is great - it means that now Probot code is being run, it tries to start up but is missing environment variables. One could set those (e.g. process.env.APP_ID = 123) before running Probot.run.

I’ll close this out 🎉

[JasonEtco]

@jannik-mohemian 👋 this is indeed very similar to https://github.com/probot/friction/issues/8 - by grabbing the code used in probot run, you can start it with a programmatic API. We’d still like to have this kind of setup as a first-class API, but in the meantime this might help get you started:

const express = require('@runkit/runkit/express-endpoint/1.0.0')
const { createProbot } = require('probot') 

const probot = createProbot({
  id: process.env.APP_ID,
  port: process.env.PORT || 3000,
  secret: process.env.WEBHOOK_SECRET,
  cert: process.env.PRIVATE_KEY
})

const myProbotApp = app => {
  app.on('...')
}

probot.load(myProbotApp)

// Register the sub-app against Runkit's special Express app
const runkitApp = express(exports)
runkitApp.use(probot.server)

Let me know if that helps! I’m not sure how you can get a Webhook URL for GitHub to send webhooks to your Runkit app so that might be a challenge - very curious to hear what you do!