Nudger Bot
TYPE
web
DURATION
1 Day
COMPLETED
December 2025
LANGUAGE
TypeScript
MISSION BRIEF
Nudger Bot is a purpose-built GitHub App designed to solve a common CI/CD reliability issue faced by teams using platforms like Vercel, Netlify, and Railway. These platforms often ignore deployment triggers initiated by non-owner collaborators for security reasons, causing merged code to go undeployed. Nudger Bot works as a trusted relay: it monitors push events on critical branches and, when necessary, creates a minimal follow-up commit under its own authorized bot identity. This ensures every valid merge reliably triggers a deployment without requiring repository owners to re-commit changes manually.
VISUAL_EVIDENCE
CORE FEATURES
- Guaranteed CI/CD trigger for collaborator commits
- Acts as a trusted intermediary for static hosting platforms
- Supports platforms like Vercel, Netlify, and Railway
- Monitors push events on critical branches (e.g. main)
- Creates minimal, non-breaking bot-authored commits
- Prevents infinite deployment loops
- Works transparently with existing workflows
- No manual re-commits required by repository owners
- Secure GitHub App authentication
- Repository-level installation and configuration
TECH STACK
- >GitHub App architecture with scoped permissions
- >Webhook listener for push and merge events
- >Bot-authored commits using GitHub App tokens
- >Branch filtering and author verification logic
- >Loop prevention using commit metadata and flags
- >Minimal file mutation strategy (timestamp-based commits)
- >Stateless event handling for scalability
- >Secure secret management for app credentials
- >Event-driven CI/CD trigger relay design
Operational Hurdles
CI/CD platforms ignoring builds triggered by collaborators
SOLUTION_PROTOCOL: Introduced a trusted bot identity that performs the final commit, ensuring deployment hooks always fire
Avoiding infinite commit and deployment loops
SOLUTION_PROTOCOL: Implemented internal checks to detect and ignore bot-authored commits
Ensuring bot commits never interfere with application logic
SOLUTION_PROTOCOL: Restricted changes to a minimal, non-functional file update to guarantee zero side effects
Balancing security with automation flexibility
SOLUTION_PROTOCOL: Used GitHub App–scoped permissions and token-based authentication to limit access strictly to required actions