Keeping Up With Greenkeeper.io

Why I Made greenkeeper-keeper, a Service to Automatically Merge Passing Greenkeeper.io PRs

Greenkeeper.io is a fantastic service that makes it easy for me to keep dependencies up to date. However, I have found that on larger projects it can get a bit noisy and create quite a few PRs. While this is still preferable to the bulk update method (IMO), it’s still not an ideal situation. I wanted to not have to deal with greenkeeper PRs at all unless a build fails. Hence the birth of greenkeeper-keeper.

The idea is simple. If a greenkeeperio-bot PR is valid, greenkeeper-keeper will merge it. Otherwise it leaves it up to you to resolve!

You can immediately deploy the application to Heroku, or you can fork the project and alter it in any way you see fit. The service works best if you create a GitHub bot and add that bot to the repos you want to monitor. An example bot:

Then simply add webhooks for greenkeeper-keeper to the repositories you want to monitor and you’re done. No more manually merging those pesky Greenkeeper.io PRs.

greenkeeper-keeper closes PR and deletes branch

And where there is an issue, greenkeeper-keeper will just leave the merging up to you:

greenkeeper-keeper aborts auto merge on failed status in PR

Just last week I closed about ~20 Greenkeeper.io PRs. I’m looking forward to putting that time to better use!