Ideas for Visualization Website

[pjattke]

Some ideas that came up that could be interesting to add to the visualization website:

• Add button to send repository_dispatch event for triggering Github Action workflows

  • See create a repository_dispatch event
  • See send a POST request from flask

• As an extension of suggestion one it would be nice to display the URL of the workflow status page after the button was pressed

  • URL can be retrieved from GitHub API

• The workflow is very simple and just sends the commands via AWS SSM to the EC2 instances. However, a successful workflow run does not guarantee that all benchmarks were executed successfully. Up to now, the easiest way is to check if the expected files were written to S3.

  • Maybe our flask application can provide a simple POST endpoint that is called from the Docker Eval image after finishing the benchmark run. It takes the tool name and shows a green light if a tool successfully finished the benchmark. ...but probably that's too much work and does not provide lot of value.

[AlexanderViand]

While it would be quite easy to do these things using someone's personal access token, putting that kind of access into a random EC2 instance would be unwise.

We could create a dummy user, but that's messy and hard to give minimal permissions to. The "proper" solution appears to register a GitHub App, but that's a bit more effort. I'll re-visit this at some point

[AlexanderViand]

/remind me to consider GitHub App in 5 days

[reminders]

@AlexanderViand set a reminder for Aug 5th 2020

[pjattke]

Instead of triggering the Workflow on the website, we could also integrate it into Slack, which is probably easier to accomplish (and safer?). The setup could look like this:

• We use Zapier with its Slack integration.
  • The Zapier Free with 100 tasks/month should be sufficient I guess.
  • It's only required to install the Zapier app in our github-sok Slack channel
  • We can either make the github-sok channel private or define in the Zapier workflow that only specific persons can invoke the action.
  • As an alternative to that, we could also create our own Slack bot like described here.
• Given a special command, the Zapier Slackbot triggers our Github Action by sending a POST request (see this example)
• We could integrate Slack notifications into our Github Action workflows (for example, by using actions-slack) so that we also get notifications there to see whether the run was successful.

[reminders]

👋 @AlexanderViand, consider GitHub App