Monitor your Github Commit Statuses with Musca tray app

Musca — Mac Tray App

Day to day, I work on many different projects on GitHub. Some are work projects, some are projects created with friends and some like Musca are my individual side projects.

I always make it a point to set up continuous integration for all my projects. The repetitive setup of CI frustrates me 😤.

I find out three problems:

1. Repetitive Setup — The way of setting up CI is usually different from project to project. However, the notification set up is largely the same. We usually set up a webhook to a slack channel.

2. Precious time wasted on going to the right page — Sometimes while working, I like to go to a particular GitHub commit/PR or the CI page that matters. But navigating on GitHub website or scrolling thru slack for the correct notification take away some time as well.

3. Spam in Channel — Even if we only set up notification for failed status, the multiple notifications from different project usually spam the slack channel. People (including me) mute the channel. This, in turn, cause us to miss failed alert for our own project as well.

I started to look for ready make solution that might possibly fix this problem but didn’t find any to my liking. 💡 I thought to myself that I could actually fix this problem and it might help other developers as well. Therefore, I created Musca.

Solution

Musca is a GitHub App and a Mac Tray app. Basically, all we have to do is grant permission for it to access our webhook and everything will work out of the box.

Installing Musca on GitHub

Developers can continue to work as usual. Whenever a commit is received on GitHub, if it triggered a CI to run, it will send the webhook to Musca. Musca will then forward the result to the Musca Mac Tray App (deprecated).

The tray icon will change color to orange (pending), red (failed), green (success) and black. It also provides hotlink directly to the correct webpage. For example, to go to the CI Page, you can click on the CI Service on the right and to go to the GitHub Commit, you can click on the commit message.

Using Musca

For now, it solves the first two problems. I decided to release the app for more developers to try and gather feedback. In other to fix problem three, I can create a watchlist and allow developers to watch repo that only matters to them.

But first, I like to know if this really brings value to a developer. As I only work on this on my free time, I like to ensure that developer likes the app.
If you are a developer who uses GitHub and CI, please help me try the app. I appreciate any feedback and like to hear what you think about it.

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I enjoy reading and writing about tech and products especially related to boosting the productivity of developers. You can say hello to me on my Twitter or my blog.