ice-repos

My goal here is to build a simple web-app allowing you to batch archive groups of repositories from a given organization, using Rust+Yew.

As a university faculty in computer science, I end up being the (co-)owner of dozens (often over 100) student repositories a year that are created via GitHub Classroom. I would like to archive these at the end of each semester or school year for a variety of reasons:

• It would help make it clear to folks that stumble across them that they're not under active development.
• I wouldn't keep getting notifications (often many notifications) from tools like Dependabot because repositories from old courses have a dependency with a potential security concern.

Archiving a single repository via the GitHub web interface is reasonable enough, but archiving dozens of repositories by hand is incredibly tedious and really not feasible. It's pretty clear that this is doable via the GitHub API, though, so I'd like to build a simple web app that allows me (and any other folks that might find this helpful) to specify an organization (e.g., the organization for a given semester of a course), and then get a list of the (not yet archived) repos in that organization, with the option of selecting which ones we'd like to actually archive.

My current plan is to do this as a Rust+Yew WASM app. There's really no particular reason to use Rust for this, but gaining a better understanding of Rust is one of my Year of Programming goals, so why not use it here?

I'll start by just trying to get a basic system up and running, but there are some things I might be interested in experimenting with as we go along:

• Use Cypress for E2E testing on the app. Probably don't really need it here, because the interface and functionality will be pretty simple, but it might be interesting to see how that plays out here. A downside, though, is that will bring the whole JS/npm ecosystem into the project, which is a pain. I don't know anything comparable that doesn't, though. I'll start with just Rust unit testing, but if I feel a compelling urge to bring in E2E testing then we'll rent a big tractor and drag Cypress into the picture. I did a little experiment to convince myself that it's doable, and it totally is, so we'll see.
• See if I can get some kind of code coverage report, preferably tht can be included in the build checks via GitHub Actions.
• Deploy the app on GitHub pages. I don't think there's any reason that this can't work fine as a serverless app, and if that does work then I can make this available to other interested folks (e.g., other instructors, people retiring old organizations) without any deployment cost to me. There seems to be a template that may help set up a lot of what we want, so it might be worth trying that.
• Work on the CSS to make it look at least decent. I've never actually done much CSS work, and this would be a good opportunity to gain some useful experience there. It looks like a lot of the cool kids are using TailwindsCSS, and there's a starter template that includes Tailwinds with Rust and Yew, so I might go with that.
• Using GraphQL for the queries. I've never actually done anything with GraphQL, but my understanding is that GitHub has nice GraphQL support, so this might be a good opportunity to explore that space. I can imagine situations where we might get info on a lot of repos (maybe more than 100) in an organization, and only need a fairly small subset of the details for each repository, which I think is exactly the kind of thing that GraphQL is good at. (I don't really know what I'm talking about, though. 😜 ) There are definitely GraphQL libraries and examples for Rust, but I haven't really looked at any of them.
• It might be interesting to build the same thing in a more "traditional" JS/TS framework as well, and it could be a nice excuse to try out something like Svelte or similar that I haven't used before. I'm not sure that will happen, but you never know.
• Go through the full GitHub "stuff you should do with your repo" list, like have development guidelines and the like. I've seen things like that show up in the settings over the past several years, but I've never stepped back to take a look at what all is happening there or think about how that might apply in, e.g., our course repositories.