Friday, February 17, 2017

Oracle Cloud - Integrate Oracle Developer Cloud Service with Slack

Slack is a cloud-based team collaboration tool founded by Stewart Butterfield. Slack finds a growing popularity with development, maintenance and DevOps teams due to the fact that it is easy to integrate with all kinds of tooling via the simple webhook methods provided by the slack team. This gives the power to develop simple applications that will send messages to a Slack channel where also humans are discussing daily business.

As an example, Oracle provides a standard integration from the Oracle Developer Cloud into the slack webhooks. This provides the option to push messages to the Slack channel from your DevOps team which contain information about, for example, builds, deployments, Git pushes, Merge Requests and others.

Having the option to integrate the Oracle Developer Cloud Service with Slack provides a great opportunity to engage your DevOps team in an always-on manner. As members will be able to see on the Slack website and on the Slack App on their mobile phones what is happening and directly discuss between each other it makes live much more easy and work much more interactive.

Create a slack webhook
To be able to make use of the integration functionality in the Oracle Developer Cloud Service towards Slack you will have to create a webhook in Slack. For this you will have to go to the Slack website and under "Channel Settings" select "Add an app or integration".


This will bring you to the app store from slack where you can search for the "Incoming WebHooks". Incoming Webhooks are a simple way to post messages from external sources into Slack. They make use of normal HTTP requests with a JSON payload, which includes the message and a few other optional details described later.

Selecting this will crate a Webhook and allow you to setup and configure your Webhook. The most important part of the setup is the Webhook URL which you will need in the Oracle Developer Cloud Service to setup the integration with Slack. A large number of other settings can be done in the Webhook configuration on the slack site.


In effect this is all that needs to be done to create the Slack webhook.

Configure Slack in the Oracle Cloud
The next step of the integration is going to your project page in the Oracle Developer Cloud Service and navigate to the Administrator section and select Webhooks. Here you will have the option to create new webhooks (from the Oracle side). When creating a new Webhook you will have the option to select Slack as a type which will show you the below set of options


As you can see you can subscribe to a number of things. For this example we are interested only in a number of specific events. To be precise, we want to see a message on our Slack channel for all Git push events and all Merge Requests on git in the Oracle Developer Cloud Service.


In effect this is all the configuration that is needed to ensure you have integration between the Oracle Developer Cloud Service and Slack to ensure that your DevOps team members can use slack as an additional information channel and discussion channel.

See the result in slack
As soon as we have configured the above we can test this with a test message in the Oracle Developer Cloud Service by sending a test message to Slack.

The real test comes when we start to push new code to the Git repository. As you can see in the below image, we are now receiving the required information in the Slack channel for the entire DevOps team to ensure everyone is aware of new Git pushes and Merge Requests.


In conclusion
Ensuring your DevOps teams are able to use all the tools they need to do the day to day job is important. It is also important to remember that this day to day job nowadays also includes always and everywhere on any device. This means that your team members want to be kept up to date on what is happening on the systems and discuss this directly with each other.

Most likely they are already using Slack or Slack like communication channel on their mobile phones. Most likely they already have a Slack channel, a WhatsApp group or they communicate on Facebook Messenger. Supporting your organisation in this and providing them even more integration in a controlled manner is adding to the overall team binding and the productivity.... and the fun. 

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