Maintainer Sentinel

A GitHub maintainer assistant that turns issues, PRs, releases, and repo health signals into actionable maintenance reports.

Maintainer Sentinel is intentionally read-only in its first release. It does not comment, label, close issues, or mutate repositories. It fetches public GitHub metadata and produces a Markdown report a maintainer can review before taking action.

Project status

Maintainer Sentinel is a new OSS project in v0.1.x. The first milestone is a stable read-only report generator for public GitHub repositories. The project is intentionally scoped so maintainers can inspect every recommendation before acting.

Why this exists

Small and mid-sized open source maintainers often carry the whole maintenance loop: issue triage, PR review, release planning, documentation updates, and security follow-up. Maintainer Sentinel helps make that work visible and repeatable without replacing maintainer judgment.

Install

npm install -g maintainer-sentinel

Or run without installing:

npx maintainer-sentinel report owner/repo

Usage

Generate raw public GitHub metadata:

maintainer-sentinel scan openai/openai-node

Generate a Markdown maintenance report:

maintainer-sentinel report openai/openai-node

Use a token for a higher GitHub API rate limit:

GITHUB_TOKEN=ghp_your_token maintainer-sentinel report owner/repo

Report Sections

• Repo overview
• Open issue buckets: bugs, enhancements, questions, needs triage, security-like
• PR queue: age, review state, and merge-risk hints
• Release readiness
• Maintainer actions, capped at 10 suggestions

Example Output

See examples/example-report.md for a sample report generated from fixture data.

GitHub Action Example

name: Maintainer Sentinel

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 9 * * 1'
  workflow_dispatch:

jobs:
  report:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    permissions:
      contents: read
      issues: read
      pull-requests: read
    steps:
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v5
        with:
          node-version: 20
      - run: npx maintainer-sentinel action "$GITHUB_REPOSITORY" > maintainer-report.md
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
      - uses: actions/upload-artifact@v5
        with:
          name: maintainer-sentinel-report
          path: maintainer-report.md

OpenAI API Roadmap

Maintainer Sentinel can be useful without AI. API-powered features will stay optional and reviewable:

• Summarize long issue threads.
• Draft PR review checklists.
• Draft release notes from merged work.
• Highlight security-like issue patterns for maintainer review.

Codex for Open Source Application Note

This project is designed as an honest early-stage open source maintainer tool. Any application for Codex for Open Source should report real project signals only: stars, npm downloads, feedback, demo repositories, and maintainer activity. Do not fabricate adoption or usage.

Development

npm install
npm test
npm run build

Roadmap

See ROADMAP.md for the current release plan and adoption milestones.

License

MIT