CONFIG.md

inform-slack - Configuration Options

These are all the environment variables you can use to configure inform-slack.

Required Core Configuration

INFORM_SLACK_CHANNEL / SLACK CHANNEL

The Slack Channel ID to send messages to. The easiest way to get the ID of a channel in Slack is to click the down-arrow next to the channel name in the Slack UI. That will bring up a modal with the channel information. At the bottom of the modal is the Channel ID, with a little button you can click to easily copy it to your clipboard.

INFORM_SLACK_TOKEN / SLACK_TOKEN

The Slack Token to use for sending messages.

INFORM_SLACK_THREAD

The thread ID for the thread we're updating. When you call inform-slack --init, it will post the first message in the thread and print it's thread_id to stdout. You must capture that value and provide it on all subsequent calls to get the messages into the thread correctly. When posting this first message with --init that's the only time this isn't required.

Optional Configuration

If you are using the default thread-progress builder for the main message, these configuration options affect how it builds those messages. (See below and in BUILDERS.md for more information about message builders).

INFORM_SLACK_TITLE

This will be used to form the "header", the first line of the message that starts the thread in the channel.

INFORM_SLACK_STATUS

If provided, this will be the last line of the main message.

INFORM_SLACK_PROGRESS_MAX / INFORM_SLACK_PROGRESS_POS

If both of these are defined and (_MAX is not 0), then the main message will also include a progress bar that shows the progress of the process. By setting the _MAX variable to the number of "things" the process needs to do, and the _POS variable to the number that have been done you can get a progress bar without having to worry about calculating percentages from the shell.

Advanced Configuration

INFORM_SLACK_REPLY_BROADCAST

Setting this to true will cause messages posted to the thread to also be posted to the channel. It's the equivalent of the "Also post to channel" checkbox in the Slack client.

It's recommended you use this extremely sparingly (or better yet, not at all).

INFORM_SLACK_PROGRESS_0_CHAR / INFORM_SLACK_PROGRESS_1_CHAR

These define the two characters that are used to build progress bars. The 1 character is for the completed portion of the progress bar, the 0 is for the incomplete portion.

INFORM_SLACK_PROGRESS_WIDTH

The width of the progress bar. You might be tempted to increase this because the default of "10" is pretty narrow, but it's the widest value that works reasonably well in the mobile client as well.

INFORM_SLACK_BUILDERS

Directories to search for builder scripts. See BUILDERS.md for more information about message builders.

INFORM_SLACK_BUILDER

The builder script for the main message. If you don't specify a builder either here, or as a CLI argument, the default is the thread-progress builder. See BUILDERS.md for more information about message builders. Run inform-slack --list-builders to get a list of all the available builders.

INFORM_SLACK_UNFURL_LINKS / INFORM_SLACK_UNFURL_MEDIA

These two options set flags that indicate to Slack whether we want links/media to be unfurled or not. By default we turn both these options off, because if either one of them is true then Slack will attempt to retrieve every URL that is mentioned in a message, in order to determine whether it is a "media" reference, or a "regular" reference.

If you would like Slack to unfurl one or both of these, set the appropriate variable to true.

INFORM_SLACK_LINK_NAMES

Controls whether Slack attempts to find channel names and usernames in messages and turn them into links.

By default we set this to false because it can be extremely annoying to have automated systems pulling you into every thread that is remotely related to you. You can set this to true in your environment to override that.

INFORM_SLACK_DEBUG

If set to any value, will enable some internal debugging in the inform-slack tool.

INFORM_SLACK_DRY_RUN

If set to any value then messages will not be sent to Slack, instead we'll just dump the JSON that would have been sent to stdout.

When in dry-run mode, the --init option will echo __DRY_RUN__ to stdout, pretending that was the thread id, and you still need to capture it and provide it back in subsequent calls. This helps you to ensure that your tools are all doing that correctly.

INFORM_SLACK_MSG_ID

If set to true then the id of every message posted will be provided on stdout, rather than just the main thread message. This can be helpful if you want to record the id of messages in the thread so that you can update them later, though I suggest just using the --msg-id flag on the messages you want to update rather than enabling this globally, as it makes it easier to ensure you are only capturing the message ids you need.