~/techulus

How to: Get push notifications from GitHub

// Written by Arjun Komath

// Sun, Nov 10 2019

If you’ve got a mobile phone, then you probably know what push notifications are. A push notification (also known as a server push notification) is the delivery of information to a computing device from an application server where the request for the transaction is started by the server rather than by an explicit request from the client. Basically, it’s these bubbles that pop up on your device.

We will use Push (push.techulus.com) as the medium for receiving push notifications.

In this article, we’ll be discussing how we can get notifications from GitHub as push notifications on our device.

Let’s get started

We will setup a real-time push notification workflow using GitHub actions (FYI, we could do the same using Zapier integration also). Before we start, make sure you’ve setup your account at push.techulus.com, installed the app on your device and copied the API key.

How to: Get push notifications from GitHub

Get the API key from Push console.

Now that we have everything ready, let’s create our workflow on GitHub. We will create a workflow that sends a push notification whenever there is a new issue in our repository.

Step 1. Open your GitHub repository page (I will use this repository https://github.com/arjunkomath/ama) and go to Actions page.

How to: Get push notifications from GitHub

Step 2. To create a new workflow click on “New workflow” or “Set up a workflow yourself” button. Now GitHub will draft a new workflow for you with an echo Hello, world! command. Let’s change this and add our custom action.

Step 3. Rename the file to issues_push.yml and then paste the following into your editor.

name: Notify issues

on: issues: types: [opened]

jobs: push:

runs-on: ubuntu-latest

steps: - name: Send Push Notification uses: techulus/push-github-action@v0.0.2 env: API_KEY: ${{ secrets.PUSH_API_KEY }} MESSAGE: "There is a new issue 😅"

Let’s go through the lines one by one:

Commit this file to master and we have created our workflow! 🎉

Step 4. Before testing the notification we have to create a secret to store our API_KEY . Open your repository settings and go to secrets tab and then click on Add a new secret.

How to: Get push notifications from GitHub

Add a new secret

Enter the name as PUSH_API_KEY (we specified this in our workflow using secrets.PUSH_API_KEY ) and enter the API key you copied from push console as the value. Click on Add secret and we’re done!

How to: Get push notifications from GitHub

Time to test our workflow, create a new issue in your repository and momentarily you should get the notification on your device.

How to: Get push notifications from GitHub

We can reuse the same action to implement different notifications based on different triggers. You can find more examples on the marketplace page https://github.com/marketplace/actions/send-push-notification.

Feel free to leave comments in case you have any questions.

Thank you!