Announcing Pester

Melissa Xie

When you’re working on a project that has a lot going on, it’s easy for a pull request to get missed in the noise. Enter Pester.

Pester is an open source tool that will automatically ping your Slack channels when a pull request has been opened. All you have to do is configure some tags (such as #ruby, #javascript, or #design) to point to certain Slack channels (such as #backend, #frontend, or #ui). Then, include at least one of those tags in your PR description. The Slack channel(s) will be pinged again after 30 minutes if the PR still needs to be reviewed. This time limit is configurable as an environment variable.

Pester also has a web view, which lists pull requests that are still waiting to be reviewed and those that are in progress.

This is great for when you want an overview of the open pull requests across your team and to help your teammates move them along.

Want your pull requests to get the attention they deserve?

Deploy your own Pester using the Heroku button in the README, then follow the “Getting Started” page on your deployed instance, and start tagging!