Pitwall

A native GNOME app to monitor your GitHub Actions runs from the desktop.

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Pitwall watches the GitHub Actions runs of a hand-picked set of your repos and keeps you on top of them from a window that looks and behaves like a first-party GNOME application — a live list of runs with colour-coded status, drill-down into jobs, steps, logs and annotations, one-click re-run / cancel, and — the point of it — a native desktop notification the moment a run fails while you're doing something else.

The name is the motorsport pit wall: where the team sits watching live timing as the race runs and calls strategy. It's the sibling of Dockyard and shares its stack: relm4 (the Elm architecture, in Rust), GTK 4 + libadwaita, with octocrab for the GitHub API and oo7 to keep your token in the GNOME keyring.

Pitwall is a personal, single-machine monitor — not a full GitHub client, not multi-user, not cross-platform. One user, one Linux laptop.

Screenshots

_{The run list (Recent / Repositories) · a run's detail with annotations}

Features

• Recent & Repositories views — a Recent tab with the newest runs across your watched repos (newest first, colour-coded status chip, repo · branch · event · time, and a failing-count badge), and a Repositories tab where each watched repo shows its latest run and expands to that repo's history.
• Failure notifications — a native GNOME desktop notification when a watched run finishes, clickable straight to that run. Configurable: failures only, every run, or off.
• Run detail — jobs and their steps with per-step status and duration, the run's branch, commit, event and elapsed time, and an Annotations section surfacing the warnings / errors / notices GitHub attaches to the run. Stays live while it's open.
• Logs — a completed job's full log in a fixed-dark terminal panel, with collapsible ##[group] sections and the tools' ANSI colour preserved. (GitHub's API has no live log stream, so a running job offers "Open in browser" instead.)
• Actions — re-run, re-run failed jobs, and cancel (with a confirmation), right from the list or the detail page, with optimistic feedback so the status updates immediately rather than waiting on GitHub's API.
• Search — filter the runs by repo, workflow or branch (Ctrl+F, or just start typing).
• Preferences — theme (follow system / light / dark), background poll interval, and notification level.
• Native and adaptive — libadwaita throughout, so light/dark, the system accent, adaptive layout and keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl+?) come for free.
• Light on the rate limit — a conditional-request (ETag) poll that pauses entirely while the window is hidden, so a backgrounded Pitwall costs almost nothing against your 5000-requests/hour budget.
• Your token stays secret — obtained via GitHub's OAuth device flow and stored in the GNOME keyring via the Secret Service, never in a config file or a log.

Requirements

• Rust ≥ 1.93 (edition 2024)
• GTK ≥ 4.20 and libadwaita ≥ 1.8
• A running keyring provider (gnome-keyring is the default on GNOME)
• A GitHub account — no token to create or paste; you sign in from the app

On Arch:

sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel pkgconf rust gtk4 libadwaita librsvg

Install

Installs the binary, the .desktop entry and the icons under ~/.local (no sudo needed — it's a per-user, one-machine app):

make install     # → launch "Pitwall" from the app grid, or run `pitwall`
make uninstall

For a system-wide install: sudo make PREFIX=/usr/local install.

Notifications need the installed app. GNOME's notification backend only shows notifications for an app it can resolve to an installed .desktop entry, so run make install (and, the first time, log out/in so GNOME Shell picks up the new icon) for failure alerts to appear.

Build and run (development)

cargo run                       # dev build, launches the window
RUST_LOG=pitwall=debug cargo run
cargo build --release           # optimised binary at target/release/pitwall

make check                      # the bar: fmt --check, clippy -D warnings, test

How it works

Pitwall is Redux with a compiler: a single model, one reducer, and a view derived from state — relm4's take on the Elm architecture. All GitHub I/O runs off the GTK main thread through relm4 commands, and octocrab's types are mapped to our own at the boundary so the UI never touches them.

• ARCHITECTURE.md — the explanation: the pieces, why they're shaped that way, and how it differs from its sibling Dockyard.
• CLAUDE.md — the rulebook: the pinned stack and the hard rules.

License

Pitwall is free software, licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later (GPL-3.0-or-later). See COPYING for the full text, or https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html.

Copyright © 2026 Miguel Rincon.