CircleCI is updating its Slack plug-in in the Pipeline Notifications section

The team at CircleCI, a US provider of tools for CI / CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery), has released a new version of its Slack plug-in called Slack orb. New to Slack orb 4.0 is the notification system that has been turned inside out compared to the previous version: Users can now activate various pre-settings en bloc from templates and adjust them individually. You can also import your own notifications using the Block Kit Builder, Slack’s own tool. Previously, commands and parameters had to be created manually individually.

Custom notification service for CI / CD teams

According to the announcement in the CircleCI blog, the new Slack orb listens to a standardized command notify and has recently mastered the job on-hold. With the notifyCommand, triggered by successful or failed events, notifications can apparently be sent to any Slack channel or to several at the same time in order to inform about the incident (success or failure of a CircleCI job). Authentication relies on OAuth instead of inbound webhooks as in previous versions of Slack orb. Interested parties can install the bot application in their Slack workspace for the CircleCI notifications and receive notifications from an integration across multiple channels. To setup the authentication there is a GitHub wiki for Slack orb.

It is advisable to remove older versions prior to installation

Since the new version has been completely rewritten compared to the previous one, users cannot install an upgrade over it. Instead, the CircleCI team recommends uninstalling older versions in the blog. Apart from that, users are free to continue to use existing older versions, which remain functional as before – but cannot be used in parallel with a new installation. After each executed job, users can trigger the command notify Send notifications about the status of completed tasks. More examples and how to create custom notifications, can be found in the blog entry on CircleCI, which contains further information on the current release. In April 2020, the DevOps company doubled its total funding through a California investor group as part of funding group E. (sih)