Who Needs an API? — err.the

GitHub is a pretty fun site to work on, I’m not gonna lie. On more than one occasion, we thought it would be pretty cool to setup a service allowing public projects to receive donations.

Sounds like an Itch

Pledgie being the venerable service it is, I decided one night it couldn’t possibly be that hard to integrate it with GitHub. It’s a pretty standard Rails site with some simple forms to make the magic happen (eg. setup a donation page).

They don’t have an API (yet), but in this day and age, you really don’t need one if you procure the proper tools.

Enter Mechanize. You can do all I’m about to describe with just Net::HTTP, but seriously, who wants to do that?

Start Scratching

Step 0: Drive girlfriend to airport, buy a case of Anchor Steam, and turn off the Xbox.

Step 1: Sign up for a Pledgie account, cause GitHub’s a regular user after all.

Step 2: Write the interface on GitHub to accept the user’s Paypal address.

Step 3: Figure out the form fields I should be filling out to login and create a new pledge on Pledgie.

Step 4: Write the Mechanize code:

def pledgify(email)
  agent = WWW::Mechanize.new
  page  = agent.get('http://pledgie.org/accounts/login')
  form  = page.forms[1]
  form['account[login]']    = GitHub::PledgieUser
  form['account[password]'] = GitHub::PledgiePass
  page  = agent.submit(form)

  link  = page.links.text(/Create A Campaign/)
  page  = agent.click(link)
  form  = page.forms[1]
  form['campaign[title]']        = "FooBarz" 
  form['campaign[paypal]']       = email
  form['campaign[description]']  = "The best project evar!" 
  form['campaign[end_date(1i)]'] = 10.years.from_now.year.to_s
  page = agent.submit(form, form.buttons.last)
  update_attribute(:pledgie, page.uri.to_s[/\d+/])
end

Step 5: Take the pledgie attribute we just grabbed and put a cool badge in their repository’s detail box.

Step 6: Watch the millions pour in for GitHub’s hard-working open source committers.

The obvious caveat here is that it relies on Pledgie not drastically changing the structure of its HTML, but it’s incredibly satisfying to throw something together like this in such a short amount of time.

PS. If you’re on GitHub and wondering how you missed the original announcement, the post is here: http://github.com/blog/57-getting-paid-the-open-source-way

Sounds like an Itch

Start Scratching

Projects

Information