Slack Action

Lightweight github action for posting to slack (using node-slack-sdk).

Slack action allows you interact with slack while exposing Github's payload. Pairing with a slack bot, this action is able to post, update, react and reply to messages while customizing the channel and message matcher / template.

The main use cases for using this actions is:

1. To monitor all merges to a master branch for tracking completed work (closed pull requests). See our example here
2. To post/update notifications when pull requests are ready for review.

Usage

You can use this action after any other action. Here is an example setup of this action:

1. Create a .github/workflows/slack-actions.yml file in your GitHub repo.
2. Add the following code to the slack-actions.yml file. Note that the message is javascript code that get executed and provided the payload variable which is provided by github

on: push

name: Posting to slack
  steps:
  - name: Posting to slack
    uses: jermainezhimin/slack-actions@v0.1
    with:
      slack-bot-token: ${{ secrets.SLACK_BOT_TOKEN }}
      channel-id: ${{ secrets.SLACK_CHANNEL_ID }}
      action: post
      message: |
        `:star-struck: New commits in _*dev*_!\n
        ${payload.commits.map((commit)=>`• [_${commit.author.name}_] <${commit.url}|${commit.message}>\n`)}
        `

3. Create SLACK_BOT_TOKEN and SLACK_CHANNEL_ID secret using GitHub Action's Secret. You will need to generate a Slack bot token from here and assign it the appropriate authorization(see Setting up Actions) and locate the channel ID.

Environment Variables

By default, action is designed to run with minimal configuration but you can alter Slack notification using following environment variables:

Variable	Default	Purpose
action	-	Actions available in slack actions. We currently support post, update,reply and react
message	-	The message template in Javascript to post, we expose the payload from github as payload variable
slack-bot-token	-	User/Bot slack authentication token
channel-id	-	Slack channel to post to, to get the channel id follow this guide

Setting up Actions

1. POST

post uses Slack's chat.postMessage API and will require the chat:write scope.

Posts the message to given channel(set via channel_id).

Arguments

1. action: post
2. message: message in the form of javascript
3. slack-bot-token: Bot token to post as
3. channel-id: Channel to post to

2. UPDATE

update uses Slack's chat.postMessage and conversations.history API and will require the chat:write, channels:history, groups:history, im:history and mpim:history scope.

This action uses the given string-matcher and searches the first message (in the past 100 messages) and replaces it with the given message.

Arguments

1. action: update
2. message: message in the form of javascript
2. string-matcher: javascript template
3. slack-bot-token: Bot token to post as
3. channel-id: Channel to post to

3. REPLY

reply uses Slack's chat.postMessage and conversations.history API and will require the chat:write, channels:history, groups:history, im:history and mpim:history scope.

This action uses the given string-matcher and searches the first message (in the past 100 messages) and replies to it with the given message.

Arguments

1. action: reply
2. message: <message in the form of javascript>
2. string-matcher: <string to match against using `includes`>
3. slack-bot-token: <Bot token to post as>
3. channel-id: <Channel to post to>

4. REACT

react uses Slack's reactions.add and conversations.history API and will require the reaction:write, channels:history, groups:history, im:history and mpim:history scope.

This action uses the given string-matcher and searches the first message (in the past 100 messages) and replies to it with the given message as the emoji name.

Arguments

1. action: react
2. message: <emoji name>
3. string-matcher: <string to match against using `includes`>
4. slack-bot-token: <Bot token to post as>
5. slack-search-token: <User token with search:read scope to search for matching messages> (optional)
6. channel-id: Channel to post to

Contributing

If you'd like to contribute, please fork the repository and use a feature branch. Pull requests are warmly welcome.

Building / Deploying / Publishing

To publish a new version:

• Install webpack (brew install webpack on Mac)
• Install any missing dependencies (npm install)
• Build the project locally (npm run build)
• Commit the dist/ folder

We will next have to tag the commit by running git tag -m "<tag message>" <tag name> (prefix tags with v and follow semantic versioning) and git push --tags to push the tag to the remote origin.

If all tests pass, we will then manually create a release. Please ensure the changelog and release title is approprately filled.

Links

• Project homepage: https://github.com/jermainezhimin/slack-actions
• Repository: https://github.com/jermainezhimin/slack-actions
• Issue tracker: https://github.com/jermainezhimin/slack-actions/issues
  • In case of sensitive bugs like security vulnerabilities, please contact jermaine.zhimin@gmail.com directly instead of using issue tracker. We value your effort to improve the security and privacy of this project!

Licensing

The code in this project is licensed under MIT license.