Dev: Avoid GitHub API rate limits with basic auth about neil

[russmatney]

Indeed, it was helpful immediately to unblock my local testing!

I added some thoughts on caching requests as a potential solution for local dev/testing (and faster neil performance) here: #127 (comment) i can port this over to a new discussion/issue if there's interest, feel free to ping me!

[teodorlu]

The rate limit seems to be a common pitfall for new contributors to this project so we may want to add something to the README as well. Maybe some better error handling for the rate-limiting HTTP response too.

Is it possible to check whether we've hit the rate limit directly in the tests, and stop with a good error message?

[borkdude]

This is how I use GITHUB_TOKEN in gh-release-artifact: https://github.com/borkdude/gh-release-artifact/blob/cf082df46a648178d1904e9cbcb787d8136a35c6/src/borkdude/gh_release_artifact.clj#L19, if anyone wants to put together a PR.

[rads]

@borkdude: It seems like it could lead to confusion if we just start using whatever GITHUB_TOKEN is defined without documenting that as part of the public neil behavior. I expect using a GitHub token would be gated by a --dev mode or simple prefixing like I did in my example (BABASHKA_NEIL_DEV_GITHUB_TOKEN).

Otherwise if we do want people to be able to use their own GITHUB_TOKEN for non-dev neil usage, we can document that. I just want to make sure we aren't doing this implicitly.

What do you think?

[borkdude]

Sounds good!

[teodorlu]

We merged @rads' proposed solution in #110. BABASHKA_NEIL_DEV_GITHUB_TOKEN is now used if set.

Though I don't think this behavior is documented anywhere.

Cc @russmatney

[rads]

Thanks for taking care of this! Since this issue is specific to the dev experience, this is now resolved from my point of view.

If we want to expand the scope here to improve the experience for end users too, let’s create a new issue for that.

[teodorlu]

Sounds good 👍

I'm happy with the current solution as-is.

I suspect that for end users, many won't appreciate extra mandatory setup.