Integrating Slack With Github Enterprise

March 6th, 2015

If you are using Slack(Yes it’s awesome) and Github Enterprise(Awesome too), then you might have played around with the integration of both the tools.

The Slack documentation helps a bit but to have a complete integration with issues, issues comments etc, you’ll have to jump through some hoops. So let me put it all below.

Adding Webhook in Github Enterprise for your Slack group/channel

First step is to obviously add a hook in your company’s Github Enterprise repo for Slack. Skip to next section if you’ve already addded the Github Webhook.

Click on the Add Service Integration menu link for your group
Select your Slack group or channel where you want the Github notifications:
Now click on the switch to unauthed mode
Copy the Webhook URL you see on the next screen. Now goto the Settings > Hooks page of your repo in Github Enterprise. Add a Webhook and paste the Webhook URL there.

After adding the Webhook you should receive notifications when anyone pushes commits to your repo.

Updating Webhook in Github Enterprise to support more notifications

Now you may have noticed that even after adding a Webhook, you can only see notifications for new commits. The integration is still missing notifications for events such a new issue or issue comment etc.

The reason is that Webhook only publishes commit events by default. You can change this behaviour by altering the hook via Github Webhook API

Assuming your Github Enterprise link as http://githuben.mycompany.com/, your organization as myorg and repo as myrepo

1 . Find your hook url (containing the hook id) by retrieving a list all the hooks for a repo:

curl --user "<User>:<Password>" http://githuben.mycompany.com/api/v3/repos/myorg/myrepo/hooks

You should see a big JSON output. All you need is the url of the hook matching your Slack Webhook integration url.

 [
    {
      "url": "http://githuben.mycompany.com/api/v3/repos/myorg/myrepo/hooks/1121",
      "test_url": "http://githuben.mycompany.com/api/v3/repos/myorg/myrepo/hooks/1121/test",
      "id": 1121,
      "name": "web",
      "active": true,
      "events": [
        "push"
      ],
      ....
      "config": {
            "url": "https://hooks.slack.com/services/SOMEHASH/SOMEHASH/SOMEHASHBUTLONGER",
            "content_type": "form",
            "insecure_ssl": "1"
          },
      ....

You can see in the JSON aboce, that events in the hook is only push. The url for our Slack hook is - http://githuben.mycompany.com/api/v3/repos/myorg/myrepo/hooks/1121

2 . Now add all the extra notifications to the events for the Webhook using the hook url from above:

curl -X PATCH --user "<User>:<Password>"  -H "Content-Type: application/json"
http://githuben.mycompany.com/api/v3/repos/myorg/myrepo/hooks/1121
-d '{"add_events": ["commit_comment", "create", "issue_comment", "issues", "pull_request_review_comment"]}'

That’s all. You should now be able to receive notifications for all these events apart from push. You can call the Get Hooks api again to confirm.

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