SlackChatOps

ChatOps made easy. This is a zero coding required Slack bot to simplify your devops needs. This Slack bot can be configured to run any number of actions against a server. All actions are configured via the config.yaml file giving you unlimited actions and possibilities.

For example, say you want to deploy your latest code against your development server. Let Slack do that for you. If your code can be deployed via the command line it can be run here.

This is built on top of the below project that makes it easy to execute commands via Slack. https://github.com/shomali11/slacker

Building

Clone repo and run

./build.sh

This will generate windows and linux binaries in the bin folder

Run the chatops executable

Configuration

Upon first run the application will exit and inform you the configuration file (config.yaml) was not present. A sample config file will be created for you in the current directory. By default a few actions have been created as samples

An action is defined as

// Action represents what the system should perform. This is typically some type of command
type Action struct {
	Name            string   // friendly name of the action
	Description     string   // description of the action
	Command         string   // actual command being called
	WorkingDir      string   // working directory for the command to be called in
	Params          []string // parameters the command needs to run. When executed the user will pass these in as arguments. 
	Args            []string // arguments to pass to the command. There NEEDs to be at least as many args as parameters (see below)
	OutputFile      string   // if the command being executed writes to a file. StdErr and StdOut are already captured. This could be an html document from a set of unit tests for example
	AuthorizedUsers []string // list of autorized users that are allowed to execute this action. This should be their slackId
}

Parameter replacement

For arguments that are passed in from the user as parameters they need to be tokenized using {x} format. For example. If we want to execute the list command for a given directory

ls /tmp -la

- name: List
  description: List info about files
  command: ls
  params:
  - param1
  args:
  - {0}
  - -la

Slack Setup

Within your slack application click the "+ Add Apps" link and browse for 'Bots'. That URL should be

https://[YOUR_DOMAIN].slack.com/apps/A0F7YS25R-bots

Click "Add Configuration" and choose a username for your Bot (Assuming chatops)

Copy the API Token as you will need to add that to your configuration created above

Channel specific bot

Within the config.yaml file the "slackchannel" value is optional and will make this bot only respond to commands for the given channel. THIS IS RECOMMENDED or else if you run multiple chatBots they all will respond.

Typical setup

Suppose you create private channels for Development & Production (chatOps-dev & chatOps-prod)

• Identify the slack channel by looking at the URLs. For example in the below url the channel is GC6AAAAAA

https://yourdomain.slack.com/messages/GC6AAAAAA/team/U0000000/

• Run this chatops application and configure the Slack API token and Slack Channel

• Create custom tasks for your development stack as needed. For example

  • Deploying new versions of your application
  • Running integration tests
  • Reading log files

  Note: You have the freedom to create any task you need for your environment. If you can run it via a shell script or command line arguments it can be run here and made available though Slack

• Via Slack type the below command to list out available actions the chatBot can perform

@chatops help

TODOs

• Permission restricted actions. Useful for production actions
• Custom output formatters for Slack
• Feedback for long running actions
• State management / persistance