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Planet Argon Planet Argon Engineering Handbook

Creating Slack Notifications for GitHub Actions

Connecting GitHub Actions to Slack allows us to receive real-time notifications and updates about code repositories in which we’re collaborating. This integration streamlines communication, enabling us to quickly respond to events like pull requests or build statuses directly within a project Slack channel.

Note: There is currently already a ‘Github Actions’ slack app that is configured to send slack messages on a GitHub Action failure. It is using notify-slack-action to send slack messages.This slack app can be re-used for any github action to send slack messages, whether that be a bundle audit or CI tests.

Using the Existing ‘Github Actions’ App to Send Slack Messages

Section titled “Using the Existing ‘Github Actions’ App to Send Slack Messages”

  1. Follow the GitHub Action Quickstart guide here to create your own GitHub Action.

  2. Once you have created a GitHub Action, navigate to the workflow YAML file. It should be in the following path: .github/workflows/your_file_name.yml

    Here is a template from notify-slack-action that you can paste into this file. This will tell your workflow to post to a slack channel if it fails.

    Terminal window
    - name: Report Status
      if: always()
      uses: ravsamhq/notify-slack-aåction@v1
      with:
        status: ${{ job.status }}
        notify_when: 'failure'
      env:
        SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL: ${{ secrets.ACTION_MONITORING_SLACK }}

    Your workflow file should now look something like this:

    picture alt

    The new code has been added from line 21 to 29

    Notice on line 29: SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL: ${{ secrets.ACTION_MONITORING_SLACK }} indicates that we will need to add a webhook URL from our Slack app to our GitHub repo.

  3. Copy the webhook URL from our Slack app. Navigate to https://api.slack.com/apps/ (make sure you are logged in with your Planet Argon account) and click on the ‘GitHub Actions’ app under App Name.

    picture alt

  4. Click on Incoming Webhooks in the sidebar under Features.

  5. Scroll toward the bottom of the page until you see the Webhook URL. Copy this link.

Note: You need to be an admin of the GitHub repo to complete the following steps.

  1. Add the copied Webhook URL to your GitHub Repository.

  • Navigate to the main page of the repository.

  • Under your repository name, click on the Settings tab picture alt

  • In the left sidebar, click on Secrets

  • Click on New repository secret.

  • In the Name input, type ACTION_MONITORING_SLACK.

  • Paste the webhook URL that you copied earlier in the value for the secret.

  • Click Add secret.

  1. The line SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL: ${{ secrets.ACTION_MONITORING_SLACK }} in your workflow YAML file links your repo with this newly created secret webhook URL. notify-slack-action does the rest of the work to connect it to Slack.

Congratulations!

Section titled “Congratulations!”

Your app will now send Slack messages when the GitHub Action fails!

References

Section titled “References”