github_monitor release notes

This is a high-level summary of the most important changes.

Changes in 2.8 (22 Sep 2026)

Version 2.8 caps how much of a large push a single notification reports and gives every monitoring failure unified subject and body across email and webhook, followed by a recovery alert when monitoring resumes. Network failures now link to a new Connection Problems page section. Alert delivery messages stay within the correct check report and alert channels that still use placeholder configuration values are shown as not configured.

Features and improvements:

• NEW: Push event commit limits - A push with hundreds of commits no longer spends one API request per commit and no longer fills the notification. PUSH_COMMITS_LIMIT (default 10, also --push-commits-limit) sets how many commits of one push are reported with their date, author URL, statistics and changed files. PUSH_COMMITS_ORDER picks which end of the push keeps them, newest by default. The remaining commits are replaced by one line naming how many were left out, or listed one line each with their SHA, author and first message line by setting PUSH_COMMITS_OVERFLOW = 'summary'. PUSH_FILES_LIMIT (default 20, also --push-files-limit) caps the changed files listed per commit. Set either limit to 0 to report everything in full.
• IMPROVE: Every profile change is sent as HTML - The alerts about a changed blog URL, an updated account, a profile visibility switch and a block now carry an HTML part like the other alerts
• IMPROVE: Failure alerts share one shape - Every monitoring failure email and webhook uses the subject GitHub Monitor error: <what went wrong> (user: <username>) and lists the fix, the guide link, how many checks failed in a row, since when and when the next retry happens. A recovery alert follows on the channels that received the failure alert once monitoring resumes. -e / --no-error-notify and --no-webhook-error-notify switch both off

Bug fixes:

• BUGFIX: An unset profile value reads the same in both email parts - A bio, location, name, company, email or blog URL that was not set printed None in the plain text part while the HTML part left the line empty. Both parts now say the same thing
• BUGFIX: Network failures point at the right page - A timed-out or unreachable GitHub request ended with a Guide: now link to the new Connection Problems section, which explains the automatic retries and what to check if the failure continues.
• BUGFIX: A failed visibility check no longer ends the run - The profile visibility lookup only handled GitHub API errors, so a timed-out or blocked connection ended the monitoring run with a traceback. The lookup now survives any failure and reports that it could not answer
• BUGFIX: Reported changes name the window they were observed in - The Check interval: line under a change always showed the configured polling interval and a date range built from it, so a change found after a failed check was reported over a window the tool had not been watching. It now measures from the previous successful check, which is the configured interval while checks run on schedule
• BUGFIX: Alert deliveries stay inside their report - The hourly Monitoring degraded reminder closed its report before the error alert was sent, so Sending email notification to ... and its webhook equivalent landed under the separator and started a second, headless block. The reminder now closes below its delivery lines, keeping one check's report in one block
• BUGFIX: Unset alert channels are reported as unset - The verbose startup summary read the values the sample configuration ships as a real destination, so a run that had never been given a mail server printed Email transport: your_smtp_server_ssl:587, a recipient of your_receiver_email and a webhook provider of Discord. Those rows now read Not configured and the channel rollup above them reads Off (not configured) rather than naming alert types nothing could deliver

Changes in 2.7 (18 Sep 2026)

Version 2.7 adds guided setup, a read-only Doctor preflight check and private SMTP password entry. Coloured output, startup summaries and verbose/debug modes make monitoring easier to follow. It improves contribution and repository-closure alerts, preserves history during failed checks and protects configuration and credentials. Documentation is searchable and release downloads can be verified.

Features and improvements:

• NEW: Guided setup - --setup wizard collects the target, intervals, credentials, notifications and output files. Review or edit answers before saving and confirm replacements. Reruns preserve saved settings and move retained credentials to the private dotenv file. Save the target to start without arguments
• NEW: Doctor preflight check - --doctor checks configuration, GitHub access, monitoring feeds, notifications and output destinations with suggested fixes. It writes no files and sends test notifications only after confirmation
• NEW: Private SMTP password setup - --set-smtp-password takes a hidden password and checks it with the mail server before saving. Guided setup also checks email credentials without sending a message
• NEW: Clearer output and diagnostics - Coloured output and a short startup summary show the active settings. --verbose adds operational updates and --debug adds technical traces. Secrets are redacted and logs retain the full summary. Customize colours with COLOR_THEME or disable them with --no-color. Copy the updated grc/conf.monitor_logs to ~/.grc/ to use the live terminal colours in saved logs
• IMPROVE: Discord alerts match the email - Discord now receives the same emphasis as the HTML email, with bold values and clickable links instead of plain text. ntfy keeps the plain body, since it would show the markers literally
• IMPROVE: Clearer errors and recovery - Failures include repair guidance, periodic outage reminders and recovery notices. Liveness messages follow elapsed time and now default to 24 hours
• IMPROVE: Removal context - Removal alerts distinguish unavailable accounts and repositories. Repositories that stop resolving are described as inaccessible because they may be private or no longer accessible to the token
• IMPROVE: Updated dependencies - Requires requests >= 2.33.0, urllib3 >= 2.7.0 and python-dotenv >= 1.2.2. Update older dependency pins before upgrading
• IMPROVE: Notification output - Subjects omit program-name prefixes. Set DELIVERY_CONFIRMATIONS = False to hide delivery confirmations while keeping verbose diagnostics
• IMPROVE: Documentation and verifiable downloads - A searchable guide covers setup, usage and troubleshooting. Releases include checksums and signed build attestations

Bug fixes:

• BUGFIX: Verified repository closures - Missing issues, pull requests and discussions require confirmation before closure alerts, using at most five extra requests per check across all repositories. Unverified items remain saved for later checks. Set VERIFY_REPOSITORY_CLOSURES = False to restore disappearance-based alerts
• BUGFIX: Reliable contributions and feed recovery - Corrected daily boundaries prevent false contribution changes. Unavailable feeds and repository details retain their snapshots and retry without stopping monitoring
• BUGFIX: Safer configuration loading - Configuration files are read as settings instead of executed as Python. Plain values and references to other settings still work. Replace imports, function calls and calculations with plain settings
• BUGFIX: Safer configuration and secret updates - --generate-config FILE confirms replacement and creates a backup. Non-interactive replacement requires --force. Shell redirection with > bypasses these protections. Exported secrets work without a dotenv file. Command-line credentials and nonempty startup exports retain priority after SIGHUP. Change those values and restart to replace them. Reloads apply changed or removed file-owned secrets
• BUGFIX: Safer alerts and connections - Webhook retries keep their original destination and credentials. Discord templates cannot enable mentions and invalid templates are rejected before delivery. Error messages redact credentials, including SMTP rejection replies. Webhooks refuse redirects. VERIFY_SSL now covers email and other outbound connections. Emails accepted by the mail server no longer become false failures if closing the connection fails, avoiding duplicate retries
• BUGFIX: Reliable startup and captured output - Invalid settings name what to fix, configured connectivity and screen settings apply and redirected output avoids terminal-clearing errors

Smaller fixes and development changes are listed in the full change history.

Changes in 2.6.3 (04 Aug 2026)

Bug fixes:

• BUGFIX: Fixed indentation of ASCII log separators in summary screen

Changes in 2.6.2 (04 Aug 2026)

Version 2.6.2 makes HTML notifications easier to navigate, improves timezone recovery and adds portable log separators.

Features and improvements:

• IMPROVE: Clickable GitHub mentions - Plain @username mentions in HTML notifications now link to the user's GitHub profile
• IMPROVE: Clear timezone recovery - When automatic detection fails, the startup error now identifies the optional tzlocal dependency, shows how to install it and explains that LOCAL_TIMEZONE can be set manually
• IMPROVE: Portable log separators - The new ASCII_LOG_SEPARATORS setting controls whether separator-only lines saved to log files use ASCII hyphens. "Auto" enables them on Windows by default, "On" enables them on every operating system and "Off" preserves Unicode separators. Terminal separators stay Unicode. Log files and all other logged text remain UTF-8.

Changes in 2.6.1 (30 Jul 2026)

Version 2.6.1 makes daily contribution monitoring reliable by avoiding incomplete GitHub GraphQL counts from narrow calendar windows.

Bug fixes:

• BUGFIX: Prevented false daily contribution increase and decrease alerts by fetching a wider contribution calendar window and rejecting responses that omit the requested date

Changes in 2.6 (30 Jul 2026)

Version 2.6 expands GitHub Monitor with repository discussion tracking and independent Discord, ntfy and custom webhook notifications. It also makes secret setup safer, aligns activity filtering with supported GitHub API events and strengthens release confidence through offline multi-version testing.

Features and improvements:

• NEW: Added tracking and notifications for opened and closed discussions in monitored repositories
• NEW: Added Discord, ntfy and custom webhook notifications with per-event controls, automatic runtime detection for Discord and ntfy.sh URLs, secure secret loading, test delivery and advanced payload customization
• IMPROVE: Added compact email and webhook category rollups to the startup summary with short labels and unstarred continuation lines when needed
• IMPROVE: Added a hidden and validated --set-github-token flow as the preferred credential setup method
• IMPROVE: Aligned the configured event list with event types supported by the GitHub Events API
• IMPROVE: Added an offline pytest suite and multi-version GitHub Actions test workflow

Bug fixes:

• BUGFIX: Added detection and notifications when a user removes the name, company, email, location, bio or blog URL from their GitHub profile
• BUGFIX: Removed trailing whitespace from clickable issue, pull request and discussion links in HTML notifications
• BUGFIX: Made SIGHUP recreate the active GitHub API client after token rotation and redetect Discord or ntfy when the private webhook destination changes

Changes in 2.5.1 (22 Jul 2026)

Features and Improvements:

• IMPROVE: Adapted repository monitoring to GitHub's 30 Jun 2026 stargazer and watcher API restrictions
• IMPROVE: Continued tracking stargazer and watcher counts for other users while limiting identity-level tracking to the token owner's repositories

Bug fixes:

• BUGFIX: Prevented restricted stargazer and watcher list endpoints from causing otherwise accessible repositories to be skipped

Changes in 2.5 (26 May 2026)

Features and Improvements:

• NEW: Added clickable commit hashes to HTML emails
• IMPROVE: Enhanced --generate-config to support writing directly to a file to avoid UTF-16 encoding issues on Windows PowerShell
• IMPROVE: Expanded tabs to spaces in output log files to ensure consistent alignment across different viewers

Changes in 2.4 (13 Dec 2025)

Features and Improvements:

• NEW: Implemented HTML formatting (with markdown to HTML conversion) for email notifications, enhancing readability and visual presentation
• NEW: Added progress bar functionality for repository processing
• IMPROVE: Enhanced contribution data retrieval by handling long date ranges more effectively

Bug fixes:

• BUGFIX: Corrected date calculation for yearly contribution chunks to handle leap years accurately
• BUGFIX: Prevented displaying "after" timestamp for older events in GitHub print output
• BUGFIX: Added handling for network errors when fetching user data
• BUGFIX: Prevented false positives for repository list changes in notifications

Changes in 2.3 (11 Nov 2025)

Features and Improvements:

• NEW: Implemented support for selected repository monitoring (see --repos flag and REPOS_TO_MONITOR config option)
• NEW: Added signal handler for daily contributions notifications (SIGURG)

Bug fixes:

• BUGFIX: Corrected daily contributions count by widening GraphQL query window to avoid timezone boundary errors

Changes in 2.2.1 (14 Oct 2025)

Bug fixes:

• BUGFIX: Replaced hard coded github.com links with dynamic base URL for GHE compatibility (thanks @commitSpectral)

Changes in 2.2 (13 Oct 2025)

Features and Improvements:

• NEW: Added daily contributions tracking and notifications (-m and -y flags)
• IMPROVE: Added support to show original repo details for ForkEvent instead of fork target
• IMPROVE: Added RateLimitExceededException handling in gh_call with safe sleep logic and header parsing

Bug fixes:

• BUGFIX: Restored missing PushEvent commits using compare API after GitHub Events API payload change in Aug 25

Changes in 2.1 (15 Jul 2025)

Features and Improvements:

• NEW: Added GET_ALL_REPOS option and -a flag to toggle between all repos and user-owned only (default)
• NEW: Added BLOCKED_REPOS to toggle alerts for blocked repos (403 TOS, 451 DMCA) in monitoring mode; always shown in listing mode (-r)
• IMPROVE: Silently handle GitHub 403 (TOS violation) and 451 (DMCA block) repo errors in monitoring mode

Changes in 2.0 (24 Jun 2025)

Features and Improvements:

• NEW: Added block status detection identifying when a tracked user has blocked/unblocked the token owner
• NEW: Introduced profile visibility detection distinguishing public profiles from private ones

Changes in 1.9.1 (13 Jun 2025)

Bug fixes:

• BUGFIX: Fixed config file generation to work reliably on Windows systems

Changes in 1.9 (22 May 2025)

Features and Improvements:

• NEW: The tool can now be installed via pip: pip install github_monitor
• NEW: Added support for external config files, environment-based secrets and dotenv integration with auto-discovery
• NEW: Introduced retry-enabled GitHub API call wrapper with fallback on failure
• NEW: Display GitHub user profile URL for the token owner and for event actors
• NEW: Display truncated GitHub repo description in relevant places
• IMPROVE: Increased GitHub event fetch size to 30 and removed fragile timestamp-based filtering
• IMPROVE: Enhanced startup summary to show loaded config and dotenv file paths
• IMPROVE: Simplified and renamed command-line arguments for improved usability
• NEW: Implemented SIGHUP handler for dynamic reload of secrets from dotenv files
• IMPROVE: Added configuration option to control clearing the terminal screen at startup
• IMPROVE: Changed connectivity check to use GitHub API endpoint for reliability
• IMPROVE: Added check for missing pip dependencies with install guidance
• IMPROVE: Allow disabling liveness check by setting interval to 0 (default changed to 12h)
• IMPROVE: Improved handling of log file creation
• IMPROVE: Refactored CSV file initialization and processing
• IMPROVE: Added support for ~ path expansion across all file paths
• IMPROVE: Refactored code structure to support packaging for PyPI
• IMPROVE: Enforced configuration option precedence: code defaults < config file < env vars < CLI flags
• IMPROVE: Display monitoring check interval range in output
• IMPROVE: Removed short option for --send-test-email to avoid ambiguity

Bug fixes:

• BUGFIX: Fixed account update date saving logic to CSV file

Changes in 1.8 (08 Apr 2025)

Features and Improvements:

• NEW: Added monitoring of repository issues and PRs
• NEW: Added support for additional GitHub event types (Member, Public, Discussion, Discussion Comment)
• NEW: Added logic to fetch parent/previous comments for all new comments (issues, PRs, commits, etc.)
• NEW: Detection of forced pushes, tag pushes, branch resets and other ref updates
• IMPROVE: Extended event logging with more detailed information
• IMPROVE: Enhanced visual output of the repository list with some nice emojis for better readability
• IMPROVE: Display event number in event list output
• IMPROVE: Refactored and cleaned up code to reduce redundant API requests
• IMPROVE: Improved exception and error handling in several places
• IMPROVE: Enhanced output formatting for readability

Bug fixes:

• BUGFIX: Fixed issue where manually defined LOCAL_TIMEZONE wasn't applied during timestamp conversion (fixes #3)

Changes in 1.7.1 (25 Mar 2025)

Features and Improvements:

• IMPROVE: Refactored code around event processing to limit API fetch and simplify logic

Changes in 1.7 (21 Mar 2025)

Features and Improvements:

• NEW: Added new parameter (-k) to disable monitoring of new Github events for the user
• NEW: Added the ability to export GitHub events to a CSV file (when -b is used together with -l)
• IMPROVE: Refactored code around event processing to address some corner cases and added awareness of the actual available number of events (as it can be less than EVENTS_NUMBER)
• IMPROVE: Email notification flags are now automatically disabled if the SMTP configuration is invalid
• IMPROVE: Setting events notifications flag to false when GitHub events are not monitored
• IMPROVE: Increased the default check interval to 20 minutes
• IMPROVE: Exception handling in a few places
• IMPROVE: Code cleanup & linting fixes

Changes in 1.6 (15 Nov 2024)

Features and Improvements:

• NEW: Support for Github Enterprise (thanks @LunaticMuch)
• NEW: Added new Github API URL parameter (-x / --github_url) to override the default value defined within the script
• IMPROVE: Showing current timestamp when we cannot get last event ID

Changes in 1.5 (11 Sep 2024)

Features and Improvements:

• IMPROVE: Saving event date timestamp to CSV file (instead of current ts) as events can be delayed by Github API

Bug fixes:

• BUGFIX: Better exception handling while processing repos and events
• BUGFIX: Fixed wrong representation of repo update date in CSV file

Changes in 1.4 (05 Aug 2024)

Features and Improvements:

• IMPROVE: Update date for repo is checked/reported before other repo attributes

Bug fixes:

• BUGFIX: Better exception handling in few places (some possible crashes fixed)
• BUGFIX: Indentation + type casting fixes in the code

Changes in 1.3 (18 Jun 2024)

Features and Improvements:

• NEW: Added support for tracking watchers/subscribers changes in public repositories (when -j parameter is used)
• NEW: Added new parameter (-z / --send_test_email_notification) which allows to send test email notification to verify SMTP settings defined in the script
• IMPROVE: Switched watchers_count to subscribers_count as in fact it corresponds to the number of watchers whereas watchers_count and stargazers_count correspond to the number of users that have starred a repository
• IMPROVE: Email notifications for repositories changes (new -q parameter) have been separated from regular profile changes notifications (-p); also signal handler for SIGCONT has been added to switch repos changes email notifications
• IMPROVE: Email notifications for repositories update date changes (new -u parameter) have been separated from regular repo changes notifications (-q) as they can be quite verbose; also signal handler for SIGPIPE has been added to switch repos update date changes email notifications
• IMPROVE: Possibility to define email sending timeout (default set to 15 secs)

Bug fixes:

• BUGFIX: Fixed "SyntaxError: f-string: unmatched (" issue in older Python versions
• BUGFIX: Fixed "SyntaxError: f-string expression part cannot include a backslash" issue in older Python versions
• BUGFIX: Missing \t character added when displaying forked repositories

Changes in 1.2 (27 May 2024)

Features and Improvements:

• NEW: Feature allowing to track changes of user's public repos like new stargazers, forks, changed description etc.; it is disabled by default, you can enable it via -j / --track_repos_changes command line argument
• IMPROVE: CSV file format changed slightly to accommodate new features
• IMPROVE: Rewritten date/time related functions to automatically detect it time object is timestamp (int / float) or datetime
• IMPROVE: Info about output log file name in the start screen

Changes in 1.1 (18 May 2024)

Features and Improvements:

• IMPROVE: Improvements for running the code in Python under Windows
• NEW: Automatic detection of local timezone if you set LOCAL_TIMEZONE variable to 'Auto' (it is default now); requires tzlocal pip module
• IMPROVE: Information about time zone is displayed in the start screen now
• IMPROVE: Event dates are displayed differently now, it also includes date of the previous event
• IMPROVE: Better checking for wrong command line arguments
• IMPROVE: pep8 style convention corrections

Changes in 1.0 (11 May 2024)

Features and Improvements:

• NEW: Possibility to define GITHUB_TOKEN via command line argument (-t / --github_token)"
• NEW: Possibility to limit the type of events to monitor via EVENTS_TO_MONITOR variable (if you use 'ALL' then all events are monitored)
• NEW: Showing the latest event for the user after the tool is started
• NEW: Added support for detecting changes in user's blog URL
• NEW: Added support for detecting account changes
• IMPROVE: Email sending function send_email() has been rewritten to detect invalid SMTP settings
• IMPROVE: Strings have been converted to f-strings for better code visibility
• IMPROVE: Info about CSV file name in the start screen
• IMPROVE: In case of getting an exception in main loop we will send the error email notification only once (until the issue is resolved)

Bug fixes:

• BUGFIX: Fixed the crash of the tool if the user have not generated any events yet (for example new accounts)
• BUGFIX: Fixed the issue of duplicated events showing up as it turned out event IDs are not always returned as increasing sequentially (we assumed earlier that new event ID value is always greater than the old one)