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GitHub Bot as a Service

Let’s take a look on how to create your own GitHub Bot automations using FlyCode
FlyCode Automation enables you to automate tasks and iterations on your code by creating and maintaining your own GitHub bots. By abstracting multiple layers of the creation of a GitHub bot, FlyCode lets team members create and maintain a GitHub bot, with only minimal configuration and virtually no coding skills required.

What are the benefits of having a GitHub Bot?

Maintaining code is an ongoing effort involving many repeating tasks, some of them require a human and some do not.
GitHub Bots enable to completely dissolve many repeating tasks from the developers’ workload, whether the task requires a human effort or not. GitHub bots operate just like a regular team member, directly on the code and in response to events in the repository. For example, a GitHub Bot can label PRs that updates tests with a certain label (e.g “Test Updates”) and even maintain a certain checklist of requirements before merging (e.g make sure a certain edge case is tested).
By automating these and many more tasks, you can save a lot of time for your team and level-ip your code standards and work processes. Because of the usefulness of GitHub Bots, all the major OSS projects use them, which allows them to handle more incoming PRs, issues and to deliver higher quality code.

Building GitHub Bots with FlyCode Automation

Even though GitHub bots are super useful, many teams don’t use them. We believe that it’s mainly because currently, it is hard and very time consuming to set one up and to maintain it.
FlyCode Automation solves this by enabling your team to set up a GitHub Bot easily and allowing any team mate to define custom automations and improve different processes. Conceptually, you can think of what FlyCode is for GitHub Bots as what PaaS are for web apps.

Key Improvements

Setup

Instead of creating a token from GitHub and maintaining it, you simply install the FlyCode GitHub App on your repository - this is your own customised bot. From this moment forward, FlyCode listens and responds to the events that you defined in your automation and acts according to your definitions.
Without FlyCode: Manage tokens with GitHub manually, store secrets, and rotate secrets.
With FlyCode: Connect the FlyCode GitHub App

Low-Code

The FlyCode App configuration provides abstractions that replace your work with code. You can easily search for patterns in the code and use the results without any prior knowledge of analysing code and a simple learning process.
Without FlyCode: Code bots with frameworks like Probot in JavaScript
With FlyCode: Define bots with GitHub actions style automation workflows

Hosting

FlyCode manages your GitHub Bot in the cloud, which means you won’t have to maintain yet another service. Since it runs in FlyCode, the cost of maintaining a GitHub Bot would be significantly smaller than hosting your own deployment in the cloud.
Without FlyCode: Host the GitHub bot in the cloud or custom deployment, monitor, manage logs, and pay for a full-fledged computing service.
With FlyCode: Run your automation workflows on the FlyCode platform.