push_notifier

push_notifier

What is it?

This is a small Go app that listens to incoming push webhook events from Github. On receiving this it will post a message to Slack with a message and the content of the file pushed.

At Springest we use this to update everyone on new files to a repo we use to share scripts and snippets with eachother. This encourages inline discussion and sharing!

Requirements

This app requires the following environment variables to be present:

• HOOK_SECRET to make sure only GH can use the endpoint
• GITHUB_TOKEN to download file contents
• SLACK_TOKEN personal authentication token
• SLACK_CHANNEL channel to send the notification to

Setup

Go to your project on Github and add a webhook. The defaults are fine, so application/json Content-Type plus the push event.

We only need to set up the URL (will know that later once deployed to Heroku) plus a shared secret for Github and our app, to verify that messages can only come from GH.

Something like the following is advised to generate a secret token:

ruby -rsecurerandom -e 'puts SecureRandom.hex(20)'

A personal access token so we have access to the files commited, to display these inline in Slack. Only the repo scope is needed for this token.

We need a token to be able to use the postMessage in Slack, you can set that up here.

The id of the channel. Go to https://api.slack.com/methods/channels.list/test to get a list of channels via the Slack API Tester.