At SmartThings, we understand that not one single person or company can possibly create every solution or scenario. Therefore, since the beginning, we knew we wanted to make our platform open; open for anyone to create solutions and integrate with SmartThings.
As an open platform, we recognize that giving our community developers access to the repository housing our SmartApps and Device Handlers is extremely important. We are pleased to announce that the SmartThings GitHub repository is now public, allowing you to browse the source code in a more familiar environment for developers to build in. Now, with the power of GitHub and SmartThings developers, features like pull requests and version control will enable you to collaborate and build robust and elegant solutions to tailor how our homes react exactly the way we want it to.
We have also provided an integration with the GitHub repository into the SmartThings IDE. The GitHub IDE integration allows you to integrate your forked SmartThings repository with the IDE. This allows you to easily view and work with SmartApps or Device Types already in the repository, as well as update the versions in your IDE with upstream repository changes, and make commits to your forked repository right from the IDE.
Just linked all my smartapps and committed the custom ones. This is amazing! How incredible to be able to just push and pull across repos seamlessly. Great work, guys!!
So we can add links to repos of other users…meaning we can link custom Smartapps to the repo of the original author to keep things updated with a couple clicks, even for apps that aren’t in the official ST-approved list. Man, that is awesome. What’s the over/under on how many forks we’re gonna have by the end of the week?
so, how does the “average” consumer of many of these custom SmartApps leverage this kind of integration?
If one of my favorite community developers updates their code, is there an easier way to apply that update/publish to my SmartApp or Device Type? The docs are oriented toward the developers (rightfully so), but I could use a guide on how to leverage this integration as a consumer…
ideally, we’ll get to an appstore where this stuff gets real easy, but I’m glad to see steps along that path.
Yeah, this iteration is definitely geared toward developers allowing them to work together more easily. It would be cool if eventually there was a way to either go to some kind of appstore or else be able to generate a link and hand it to a non-developer user who has no github account and have that automatically create a link between their IDE and that developer’s repository to handle the automatic updating. My guess is the team at Smartthings has already started thinking about that. It’s too obvious an enhancement not to!
One of the best things is that this integration streamlines the update process for submitted and published SmartApps so that new updates are much easier to make and approve.
Pretty cool stuff! I am not a developer (more of a hacker of someone else’s code) and am very new to GitHub, still trying to understand it. This gives more more of an incentive to learn the in’s and out’s Looks like updating apps will be alot easier now.
Thanks!
Hey @schettj, just to clarify - are you referring to the text within the the wizard itself, or in the documentation? I am thinking you mean within the wizard in the IDE?
[quote=“Jim, post:20, topic:20104”]
text within the the wizard itself
[/quote]Yep - in the wizard, as you enable Github integration for the IDE, on the “step 2” page
Looks like updating apps will be alot easier now.