marge-bot-slack-tool

A tool for posting the current merge requests waiting to be merged by Marge-bot to a Slack channel. (Note that we use this ourselves with our fork of Marge-bot, but there should be nothing preventing it from being used with the upstream Marge-bot version if needed)

The tool has been tested with on-premise installations of GitLab only, but could theoretically work for GitLab SaaS (i.e. gitlab.com) as well.

Screenshot

When the tool is running and you have three merge requests in the queue, it can look like this:

Local development

The project is written on Python and has been tested with version 3.9. To install the pip dependencies from requirements.txt, use pip install.

There are also local environment variables that need to be set to be able to run the script locally. The preferred way of doing this requires the following tooling:

direnv (sudo apt-get install direnv)

With this in place, direnv should set up the environment variables whenever you cd to the project directory. You can also set the environment variables using some other means; just set all the variables mentioned in .envrc in that case.

You can then execute the script like this:

$ # The DEBUG flag makes the script be more verbose, logging HTTP requests to stdout/stderr
$ DEBUG=true ./marge_bot_queue_poster.py

Deployment

The normal way to run this would be to clone the marge-bot-slack-tool to your GitLab server (for on-premise installations):

$ ssh <some-server>
$ sudo su <some-user>
$ git clone https://github.com/hiboxsystems/marge-bot-slack-tool.git
$ # Add environment variables above to to ~/.bashrc and customize to match your setup

Add all the following (mandatory) environment variables to .bashrc (presuming Bash is being used for the user in question, which is the default on most Linux distributions):

export MARGEBOT_PROJECT_IDS=1,2,3,4,5
export MARGEBOT_GITLAB_URL=https://gitlab.example.com
export MARGEBOT_GITLAB_TOKEN=top-secret-token
export MARGEBOT_HELPER_SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL=https://hooks.slack.com/path/to/webhook
export MARGEBOT_HELPER_SLACK_CHANNEL='#some-slack-channel'
export MARGEBOT_HELPER_STATE_FILE_PATH_PREFIX=/path/to/marge-bot-slack-tool/gitlab-marge-bot-helper/local/state

Add a crontab entry for the <some-user> account, to run the tool periodically (once every minute with the settings below). Note that the manual sourcing of ~/.bashrc is critical, to make the environment variables available to the process.

SHELL=/bin/bash

# m h  dom mon dow   command
* * * * * . ~/.bashrc && /path/to/marge-bot-slack-tool/marge_bot_queue_poster.py >&1 | logger -t marge-bot-slack-tool

If all goes well, you should now be receiving messages in #some-slack-channel whenever there are two merge requests or more pending in the queue.

License

BSD 3-clause

The files in marge are copied from https://github.com/smarkets/marge-bot with minimal changes. These files are Copyright 2017 Smarkets Limited and are licensed under the same terms as this tool (except for the Copyright notice).