GitHub Follower Notification App

Any developer would most probably be familiar with GitHub & its notification system. Currently, GitHub provides email notifications to watched repositories & mentions. However, GitHub fails to provide a similar email notification when someone follows / unfollows you. This GitHub App solves this issue by mailing the users on a daily basis about any new followers / unfollowers - to the email ID which is associated with their GitHub account. With just a click of a button here, you can activate this service.

• Web App Homepage : Hosted on Heroku
• Source code : GitHub Repository
• Server : Heroku
• Database language : Postgres
• Cron job : Heroku Scheduler
• Website framework : Ruby on Rails as back-end, and Bootstrap as front-end

Working with the GitHub API OAuth without using any external gem like Devise can become messy and even difficult at times. However, it was this guide that played the role of saviour when I was stuck. Following the above guide, I was able to exchange the code , client_id and client_secret for an access_token . An access_token is the parameter through which my application can access a user's public information such as name , email , github handle , followers list , etc. However, reloading the callback_uri made the website throw an error as a code when exchanged once can't be used again. Hence, I found out that I had to maintain session variables & redirect properly so that the accesstoken won't be visible in the `callbackuri`.

Once the access_token was received, I had to store it into the database. Before storing in the batabase, I also had to make sure that no two access_token s point to the same user account - as this case would lead to multiple emails being sent to that user on that day. Then, the cron job logs into each user in the database and mails them their respective notification emails if there are any new followers / unfollowers.

So - that's how I built it, folks. Comment below, your thoughts on this application. If you liked this project, do star the repository & follow me on github.