GitHub Release Notification Via IFTTT

IFTTT (If This Then That) is my swiss army knife when it comes to automated actions like in this case, notifications of new releases of a GitHub repository. GitHub’s notification service is limited why we need a service like IFTTT to get what we want and last Sunday, I stumbled over the fact that GitHub already provides Atom RSS Feeds for a handful of its web API endpoints.

Where can I find those Atom RSS Feed URLs?

Easy, add .atom at the and of the releases URL https://github.com/angular/angular-cli/releases.atom and go on creating the IFTTT applet.

Creating our IFTTT applet

I assume you already joined the IFTTT community, otherwise follow the link to join!

I’m going to use Angular CLI and its release Atom Feed to create our applet with IFTTT’s Applet Maker, which you can find here. Click on the big blue +this link and start choosing a suitable service we need. For our Atom Feed, we click on the Feed symbol and select the New feed item afterward as our action. Enter our source URL https://github.com/angular/angular-cli/releases.atom and create the trigger.

Until now we have a service running which checks our Atom Feed a good few times per day for new items. Now we need to define what should happen when a new feed item appears. It’s entirely up to you which service you want to use. You can tell IFTTT to send you an email, a Facebook message, a text, an iOS reminders, and so on.

I go with apple’s iOS reminders and use the only trigger “Add reminder to list”. If you haven’t authorized your Apple ID with IFTTT yet, you have to do it just now and once. The action fields from the next step I leave it as it is, “create the action”, choose a suitable name for my new applet and finish creating the applet.

Your applet is now active and running.

Cheers