Huebot

Changes a Phillips Hue light's color and flashes based on GitHub's status

What it does

• When GitHub's status changes to minor the light will turn to yellow and flash for 15 seconds.
• When GitHub's status changes to major the light will turn to red and flash for 15 seconds.
• When GitHub's status changes to good the light will turn white and stop blinking.

How it works

When GitHub's status changes, @githubstatus Tweets. We use that as an inbound web hook to tell the app to change the light's state. The app streams the account's Tweets, and uses GitHub's status API to grab the current site status any time it changes, and then makes a call to the Hue Remote API to set the light accordingly.

Constraints

I wanted the app to do two things:

1. Change immediately. (e.g. no polling the RSS feed)
2. Work outside the light's home network (e.g., over the internet).

Prior art and special thanks

• @johndbritton's Twitterhook for streaming Tweets
• @websages's GitHub Status Hue for the idea and undocumented API

Configuration

You'll need to create a Hue App, and then will want to set the following configuration variables:

• HUE_CLIENT_ID
• HUE_CLIENT_SECRET
• HUE_LIGHT_ID - numeric ID of light on bridge, e.g. 1, 2, or 3

You can get these by running script/auth-server and loading the page in your browser.

You'll also want to configure githubstatus.com to send your instance a webhook when the status changes.