🛠️ What I Worked On

This past weekend’s efforts were focused on adding GitHub integrations to ServerSinc. By the end of the first day (it being a 3-day weekend), I had the following shipped:

🔐 GitHub Signup

Nothing too fancy here—Laravel Socialite handles most of the heavy lifting, and I simply store the GitHub user ID in the database.

I’ll likely phase out email signups soon. It removes the need for a separate flow to connect a GitHub account later, especially if a user decides to create an application from a repository. Which leads me to...

🏗️ Create an Application from a GitHub Repository

This feature required updates across several parts of the codebase.

The UI for creating an application now includes a new option: “Build from GitHub Repository.”
Once selected, users are taken to a new page where they can:

• Choose a GitHub repository
• Select a branch (fetched live using Livewire once a repo is selected)

After the application is created, a job is dispatched to the queue to install a GitHub webhook. This hook points to the ServerSinc API and triggers a rebuild whenever new code is pushed.

The whole kit and kaboodle took less than a morning to integrate using Laravel and GitHub’s API. Copilot chipped in here and there, but since I’d built a similar flow in a previous version of ServerSinc, most of it came straight from memory.

🚀 Deployments and Deployment History

While the natural next step might’ve been handling incoming webhooks to trigger builds, I decided instead to focus on the Deployments tab under each Application.

This now shows:

• A list of deployments
• The ability to trigger a new deployment

The table is powered by Livewire and automatically updates with new deployments using Livewire’s poll attribute.

🔧 Building a Github Repo

This is a big one, with lots of moving parts behind the scenes. I’ll be writing a separate deep-dive article on how this job works and what it actually does under the hood.

✅ Wins

• GitHub OAuth integration
• Created deployments tab with history
• GitHub repository hooks connected to ServerSinc
• Triggering builds via BuildNewGithubApp

⚠️ Challenges

• Switching context between two repos in two different languages—Laravel (for the dashboard) and Node.js (Tugboat). I still occasionally forget syntax 😅

💡 What I Learned

Don’t over-engineer everything.

In v1 of ServerSinc, I went all in—custom build servers, private Docker registries, the works.

This time, I’m sticking to the mantra:
“What’s the simplest way to make this work?”
Then iterate from there.

🔜 Next Up

• Finish the BuildNewGithubApp job
• Add webhook listener to trigger rebuilds from pushes