At Fog Creek, we heavily use HipChat to handle quick internal communication. One thing we decided we wanted on the Kiln team was to get real-time notifications whenever anyone pushed to one of our main repositories. Thankfully, Kiln has a feature called webhooks that cause Kiln to broadcast repository events to a random web URL, and HipChat has a nice little API to post notifications in chat rooms. So I whipped up a little web service, called Squawker, to handle this kind of thing for us.

You can download Squawker from my public Kiln account (yup! Kiln now does public repos!) that you can customize for your particular environment. Whenever you push to a central repository, Squawker will notify the HipChat channel of your choice. Branch repositories are explicitly ignored so that everyone’s little experiments don’t flood the channel, but it’s obvious in the code how to change that if you want different behavior.

Happy coding!