Show HN: Derek – delegate fine-grained GitHub permissions to community
GitHub - alexellis/derek: Reduce maintainer fatigue by automating GitHub
derek






Derek reduces fatigue for maintainers by automating governance and delegating permissions to your team and community.

Follow @derekapp on Twitter.

User guide / documentation
From the team that brought you OpenFaaS - Serverless Functions Made Simple.
Core features
All features are modular and can be enabled/disabled as required:

Generate changelogs for releases with PRs merged and commits added
Let designated non-admin users manage Issues and PRs by commenting Derek <command> or /command
Enforce Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) checking (optional)
Automatically label/flag PRs without a Description
Label PRs from first-time contributors
Detect spam PRs (from hacktoberfest)
Automatically close PRs during hacktoberfest from first-time contributors

For the managed service the cost is 25USD per month. You will need to become an OpenFaaS GitHub Sponsor to gain access to the managed service. The price covers hosting, management and maintenance of the service.
Built for developers by developers



User guide
Find out what Derek can do you for your project, community and team including all available commands and configuration options
Read the user guide
Start using Derek today
Get started here: Onboarding guide
How do I work?
I'm designed to be installed as a GitHub App, but don't worry - I don't need a lot of permissions. Just access to issues and Pull Requests will do.
I'm not a long-running daemon.. I'd get bored that way. I work with webhooks - so deploy me to a Serverless platform like OpenFaaS and forget about me. Just apply oil from time to time.
This is me in action with the DCO-checking feature. If I find a commit that isn't signed off then I'll let the contributor know in a comment. Normally they edit their commits and re-push within a few minutes after re-reading the message.

Inspiration for Derek
The idea for a bot that could comment on issues or respond to activity is from the docker/docker or Moby project's bot called Poule. It's a much more complex long-running daemon which uses Personal Access Tokens (so needs to run as a full GitHub login). Derek is much simpler (so hackable) and can be installed with granular permissions.
Live demo here
Our users
Some of our users include:

Docker / Moby
okteto
OpenFaaS
inlets
arkade
k3sup

Backlog:

 Derek as a managed GitHub App (SaaS)
 Lock thread
 Edit title of Issue/PR
 Toggle the DCO-feature for those who don't need compliance
 Show help messages such as how to join Slack or asking for a rebase via Derek message
 Automate release notes based upon PRs closed
 Add each commit to release notes

Future work:

 Add merge feature based upon policy (in-progress)
 Caching of customers / .DEREK.yml file
 Observability of GitHub API Token rate limit
 Add roles & actions
 PR target branch checking (i.e. no PRs from master to master)

Maintainers and contributors
There are over a dozen contributors to Derek, but the following people have made the most impact.
Maintainer(s):

Alex Ellis - creator & lead maintainer

Hall of fame:

Martin Dekov - @martindekov
Burton Rheutan - @burtonr
John McCabe - @johnmccabe
Lubomir I. Ivanov - @neolit123
Ivana Yovcheva - @ivanayov
Richard Gee - @rgee0

Alex Ellis created Derek to automate project maintainer duties around licensing and to help bring granular permissions back to GitHub. Derek has empowered contributors in the OpenFaaS community to run and maintain the project without needing full write access. OpenFaaS contributors continue to improve Derek so they can get the job done without fuss.
Contributions
Please follow the OpenFaaS contribution guide.
