Sending slack notifications with github actions

July 2, 2023
Github Actions Slack

This is a small post about sending neat slack notifications from Github Actions. If it looks good, you get developers to click on the notification, trust me 😄

slack-notification

Here are the steps:

  • Create a new slack app from https://api.slack.com/apps, named Github actions and with a cool github logo
  • In Incoming webhooks, create a webhook, and save the webhook as a Github Actions repository secret with the name SLACK_NOTIFICATIONS_TOKEN
  • Add the newly created app to your channel: Channel settings > Integrations > Apps > Add apps. You should see a message on the channel: John Doe added an integration to this channel: Github Actions
  • From the same setting page, get the Channel ID, you will need to set it in the YAML.
  • Tweak your existing YAML manifest in .github/workflows to add the following snippet:
  # [...]
  deploy:
    name: 'Deployment'
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    timeout-minutes: 10
    steps:
      # - name: Deploy
      #   run: deploy.sh
      # [...]

      - name: notify slack
        id: slack
        uses: slackapi/slack-github-action@v1.24.0
        # https://api.slack.com/apps/<your-app-id>/incoming-webhooks
        if: ${{ failure() }}
        with:
          channel-id: 'F04D4MXFY3R' # slack channel #alerts-test
          payload: |
            {
              "text": "GitHub Action failed",
              "blocks": [
                {
                  "type": "section",
                  "text": {
                    "type": "mrkdwn",
                    "text": "*Production deployment check failed* :fire_engine:\n High error rate detected after deployment! Rolling back..."
                  }
                },
                {
                  "type": "actions",
                  "elements": [
                    {
                      "type": "button",
                      "text": {
                        "type": "plain_text",
                        "text": ":github: Failed action"
                      },
                      "url": "${{ github.server_url }}/${{ github.repository }}/actions/runs/${{ github.run_id }}"
                    },
                    {
                      "type": "button",
                      "text": {
                        "type": "plain_text",
                        "text": ":grafana: Grafana dashboard"
                      },
                      "url": "https://<your_organization>.grafana.net/d/my-app-dashboard?from=now-1h&to=now"
                    }
                  ]
                }
              ]
            }
        env:
          SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL: ${{ secrets.SLACK_NOTIFICATIONS_TOKEN }}
          SLACK_WEBHOOK_TYPE: INCOMING_WEBHOOK

Feel free to customize the "mrkdwn" part as you want, you can learn more about formatting here: https://api.slack.com/reference/surfaces/formatting.

In the buttons, I like to add the failed action that sent the notification, and a link to the production app grafana dashboard.

💡 Note 1: You can notice I use custom slack emojis to ✨beautify✨ the slack message: github and grafana. Check this link on how to add custom emojis if you don't know yet: https://slack.com/help/articles/206870177-Add-custom-emoji-and-aliases-to-your-workspace You can go to https://slackmojis.com/ to find the Github and the Grafana ones.

💡 Note 2: You can use if: ${{ failure() }} on the step level to only send the notification when the previous step (the deployment) failed :D

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