Today we’re making our Slack integration generally available to all Heroku customers through the release of Heroku ChatOps.
ChatOps is transforming the way dev teams work, replacing the asynchronous communication and context-switching of traditional operations processes with a shared conversational environment so teams can stay focused, communicate in real-time, gain visibility, and speed joint decision making.
Having seen the benefits of Slack integration for managing our own apps, we wanted to make ChatOps easier to use and accessible to every dev team. Heroku ChatOps handles the complexity of user onboarding, authentication, and accountability between Slack & Heroku, and provides users with an intuitive slash command interface and curated Slack notifications to improve your team’s efficiency and transparency. Heroku ChatOps is easy to set up and works out of the box with just a simple click installation.
Our initial release supports the integration of Heroku’s popular Pipelines continuous delivery workflow with Slack. This means you can deploy and promote pipeline apps, and keep informed of your team’s releases and integration test status without ever leaving Slack.
Getting Started
We made ChatOps simple to install using a one-click command from the Dev Center page. Team members can then seamlessly authenticate from Slack with their GitHub and Heroku accounts via OAuth.
Heroku Flow and Team Ready
We designed ChatOps with teams and Heroku Flow -- a visual, easy to use workflow for continuous delivery -- in mind. All of your team’s Heroku Pipelines are visible and available for managing from within your team’s Slack channel. ChatOps allows your team to have shared visibility and collaborate effectively on continuous delivery workflows from within Slack.
Proactive Notifications
ChatOps unifies monitoring of your continuous delivery workflow by creating proactive notifications in Slack for Heroku Pipelines associated events like pull request openings, Heroku CI activity, or Dashboard-initiated deployments and promotions. No more looking through multiple emails, activity logs, or forwarding notifications -- everyone sees the same thing immediately in the same place.
Slash Commands for Collaborative Deployment
ChatOps brings the deployment processes that are happening behind the scenes on a single engineer’s laptop to the forefront, using a set of slash commands to help manage the delivery of your Heroku applications from inside of Slack. You can deploy to apps in any stage of your team’s pipeline or promote to production directly from within Slack.
Output from deployment and pipeline promotion commands are organized into threads to keep things tidy. ChatOps will alert you if a required deployment check failed with a user-friendly error message. You also have the option of ignoring the check failure and forcing a deploy. Pipeline configuration details and release history are also readily available.
Learn More
Installation instructions and the full list of commands are available in our Dev Center documentation. More details how we built our Slack integration are available on the Slack Platform Blog.