How to notify github issues when you deploy

A common problem in any production application is that there is a natural delay between submitting a fix and the fix being deployed. Even with an awesome continuous build process that uses fast parallel testing, it can be hours or a day before the production site sees the fix.

This means the customer service folks either have to continously check the production site or the deployment logs and then know how to test or match the fix numbers with the deployments. This is a hard problem that either solved with labor or customers get notified something is fixed before they can test the fix.

At Pubget, we use github and rake for deployments (to passenger apache servers). So, we decided to solve this problem with code. Essentially, when a fix or number of fixes are deployed, we use the github API to comment on each issue when it is deployed. This allows the customer service folks who are participating in the issues to get automatically notified when their fixes make their way through the build process.


To do this, we call this from the deployment rake task:

This looks for fixes that have made its way to the master branch, through our build process and that have our deploy tag and update them with a comment when the fix was deployed.

Now the customer service folks know exactly when their fixes are on the production site and don't need to monitor or ask developers when they can connect with the customer to give them the good news that their bugs have been fixed.