GitHub + Slack Integration

Heads Up! The GitHub and Slack app has a few new features to help you turn conversations into next steps. Take action on pull requests, issues, and more right from your Slack channels to start moving work forward, faster. Read more about it on the GitHub blog.

About

The GitHub integration for Slack gives you and your teams full visibility into your GitHub projects right in Slack channels, where you can generate ideas, triage issues and collaborate with other teams to move projects forward. This integration is an open source project, built and maintained by GitHub.

Table of Contents

• Installing the GitHub integration for Slack
  • Requirements
  • Installation
  • Subscribing and Unsubscribing
  • Authorization
• Getting Started
  • Receiving realtime notifications
  • Repository Activity
  • Deployments and Actions approval notifications
  • Link previews
  • Take action
  • Configuration
  • Moving away from the legacy workspace app model in Slack
• Need help?
• Contributing
• License

Installing the GitHub integration for Slack

Requirements

This app officially supports GitHub.com (which includes our GitHub Enterprise cloud-hosted offering) and Slack.com, but the team plans to support GitHub Enterprise Server (our self-hosted product) in the future.

Installation

Install the GitHub integration for Slack. After you've signed in to your Slack workspace, you will be prompted to give the app access:

After the app is installed, and once you've added the GitHub integration to the relevant channels using /invite @github, you will see previews of links to GitHub issues, pull-requests, and code rendered as rich text in your workspace.

Subscribing and Unsubscribing

At this point, your Slack and GitHub user accounts are not linked. To link the two accounts, authenticate to GitHub using a /github slash command, /github signin.

The /github slash command also accepts a subscribe argument that you can use to subscribe to an Organization or Repository's activity /github subscribe <organization>/<repository>.

If you originally gave the app access to "All repositories" and you've created a new private repository on GitHub after installing the GitHub integration for Slack, the /github subscribe command will work automatically on your new repository. If you installed the app on a subset of repositories, the app will prompt you to install it on the new repository.

The /github slash command also supports unsubscribe. To unsubscribe to notifications from a repository, use /github unsubscribe <organization>/<repository>

Authorization

By granting the app access, you are providing the following authorizations to your GitHub and Slack accounts:

Slack Permission Scopes

GitHub Permission Scopes

Receiving realtime notifications

• To receive realtime notifications you should visit the scheduled reminders settings page on GitHub
• Edit the settings for the organisation you would like to enable notifications for
• Add the Slack workspace you are looking to receive notifications to
• Toggle Enable real-time alerts and select the alerts you would like to receive
• Save the settings and you will begin to receive real time alerts to your configured Slack workspace for the organisation you chose

Repository Activity

Subscribe to an Organization or a Repository On repositories, the app notifies of open, close, and re-open events on pull requests and issues in repositories you've subscribed to. It also notifies of any push directly to the repository's default branch as well as comments on issues and pull requests.

Deployments and Actions approval notifications

Deployment review notifications for your GitHub Actions environments can now be tracked end-to-end from your channel or personal app in Slack. You will be notified when a review is pending on your environment, when an approval is completed and you can see the real time status of your deployment.

These notifications are available as part for "deployments" feature which is enabled by default when you subscribe to your repository or organization.

The following are the notifications available as part of "deployments" feature:

1. Deployment review pending notifications for your environments being deployed through GitHub Actions workflow.

2. Deployment review completed notifications for your environments being deployed through GitHub Actions workflow.

3. Deployment status notifications for your environments. And the notification shows workflow information if the environment is deployed from GitHub Action workflow.

Link previews

When a user posts a GitHub link to issues and pull requests, directly linked comments, code blobs with line numbers, as well as organizations, repositories, and users in Slack, a preview of the link will be shown.

Previews of links will not be shown if:

• link previews for github.com have been disabled for your workspace
• the same link was already shared in the last 30 minutes in the same channel
• 3 or more links are shared in the same chat message
• The repository is private and the user that shared the link:
  • has not signed in to their GitHub account
  • asked not to show a preview when prompted
  • the GitHub app is not in the channel, which you can remedy with /invite @github

Take action

Slack conversations often lead to decisions and actionable takeaways. Now it’s easier to start on next steps from Slack with slash commands for common GitHub actions, using /github [action] [resource]. These commands let you:

• Close an issue or pull request with /github close [issue link]
• Reopen an issue or pull request with /github open [pull request link]
• Open a new issue with /github open [owner/repo]

Configuration

You can customize your notifications by subscribing to activity that is relevant to your Slack channel, and unsubscribing from activity that is less helpful to your project.

Settings are configured with the /github slash command:

/github subscribe owner/repo [feature]
/github unsubscribe owner/repo [feature]

These are enabled by default, and can be disabled with the /github unsubscribe owner/repo [feature] command:

• issues - Opened or closed issues
• pulls - New or merged pull requests, as well as draft pull requests marked "Ready for Review"
• commits - New commits on the default branch (usually master)
• releases - Published releases
• deployments - Deployment review notifications and Deployment status updates.

These are disabled by default, and can be enabled with the /github subscribe owner/repo [feature] command:

• reviews - Pull request reviews
• comments - New comments on issues and pull requests
• branches - Created or deleted branches
• commits:* - All commits pushed to any branch
• +label:"your label" - Filter issues, pull-requests and comments based on their labels.
• discussions - Discussions created or answered

You can subscribe or unsubscribe from multiple settings at once. For example, to turn on activity for pull request reviews and comments:

/github subscribe owner/repo reviews comments

And to turn it back off:

/github unsubscribe owner/repo reviews comments

Filters

Branch filters for commit

Branch filters allow filtering commit notifications. By default when you subscribe for commits feature, you will get notifications for your default branch (i.e. main). However, you can choose to filter on a specific branch, or a pattern of branches or all branches.

• /github subscribe org/repo commits for commit notifications from a default branch.
• /github subscribe org/repo commits:* for commit notifications across all the branches.
• /github subscribe org/repo commits:myBranch for commit notifications from a specific branch.
• /github subscribe org/repo commits:users/* for commit notifications from a pattern of branches.

You can unsubscribe commits feature using `@github unsubscribe org/repo commits.

Note: Previously we you might have used commits:all to represent all branches. 'all' is no longer a reserved keyword. Going forward, you need to use '*' to represent all branches. If you have already configured with 'commits:all' previosly, dont worry, it will continue to work until you update the commits configuration.

Label filters for prs and issues

Label filters allow filtering incoming events based on a whitelist of required labels.

This is an overview of the event types that are affected by the required-label filter.

Creating a filter

Create a filter with:

/github subscribe owner/repo +label:priority:HIGH

This creates a required-label filter with the value priority:HIGH. Incoming events that support filters are discarded unless they have that label.

Updating a filter

To update the existing filter just enter a new one, the old one will be updated. Currently, we only support having one filter. Multiple filters might be supported in the future.

/github subscribe owner/repo +label:"teams/designers"

Now the existing filter priority:HIGH has been replaced by teams/designers.

Removing filters

Removing a filter is available via unsubscribe

/github unsubscribe owner/repo +label:teams/designers

This removes the teams/designers filter.

Listing filters

To see the currently active filters use

/github subscribe list features

Valid filters

It is common to have certain special characters in labels. Therefore we added support for the most common special characters for label filters. Here a few examples:

• label:priority:HIGH
• label:teams/designers
• label:"DO NOT MERGE"
• label:"very important"
• label:":construction: WIP"

Most labels will work seamlessly, this includes all emojis that slack and github provide out of the box. However in the following rare circumstances you might run into difficulties:

• Multibyte characters that are not encoded as :foo:
• , is reserved

Moving away from the legacy workspace app model in Slack

You need to update your GitHub app if you have installed the GitHub Slack integration in your workspace before April 09, 2021.

1. Why do I need to upgrade?

Previous GitHub integration for Slack is built on top of Slack's workspace apps. Unfortunately, Slack deprecated the workspace apps. More details about the announcement can be found on the Slack documentation.

Our workspace app relies on Slack APIs that are now deprecated and will be retired soon. We now need to move to Slack's newly supported bot app framework.

2. How do I upgrade?

You can upgrade the GitHub app in two ways.

1. By installing the new GitHub app from the Marketplace or click on the install link here. We will automatically detect and update the old app and migrate your subscriptions.
2. If you are on the old app, you will start receiving alerts in your channels to update. The old app will be upgraded, and you will get a confirmation message once the upgrade is completed. Also, a message will be posted in all your channels once all your subscriptions are successfully migrated.

3. What changes after the upgrade?

No change in the way our GitHub app for Slack works. Once you upgrade, we will migrate all your subscriptions and replace the old legacy GitHub app.

In terms of notifications, if you have subscriptions configured only in public Slack channels, everything works seamlessly after the upgrade. However, if you are using GitHub app in private channels, you need to invite the GitHub app to the channel for your subscriptions to work again.

Once you upgrade, GitHub will send a message to invite the bot again if you have any private channels.

Along with this upgrade, we have also made few changes to the app.

• Enhanced security for sign in experience: As part of this upgrade, we have also updated the sign in flow to have a multistep process with verification code. This is necessary to make sign in to GitHub from Slack more secure.

• Introduced Branch filters for commit notifications: Commit notifications now support filtering based on branches. You can choose to filter on a specific branch, or a pattern of branches or all branches. You can find more details here.

• Removed deploy command and notification support: Today, the functionality provided by deploy command is very limited and doesn't address all the scenarios. We are removing deploy command and notifications support as part of this version. We want to relook at the scenarios and build a more holistic experience that customers need.

• Public feature i.e. repo notification is always enabled: Going forward, you will not see 'Public' in the subscribe features list. However, whenever a change happens to the repo it will be notified in the channels where it is subscribed and user will not have option to disable 'public' notifications. Repo is a core entity and when some change happens to the repo that user choose to subscribe, it is the basic info that has to be notified to the user.

4. When do I need to migrate by?

All your workspaces need to be upgraded by July 15, 2021 after which the old version of the app will stop working. If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to us by logging an issue here.

Questions? Need help?

Please fill out GitHub's Support form and your request will be routed to the right team at GitHub.

License

The project is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

When using the GitHub logos, be sure to follow the GitHub logo guidelines.