VSTS-SlackBot

Post info from Work Items in Visual Studio Team Services if a Work Item is mentioned in a channel, group chat or private message

How the bot works

The bot will listen to messages in all channels it's a member of. The bot will extract all accourances of a hashtag (#) followed by a number and search VSTS for this Work Item Id. If it get any matches it will return basic information from each of the items found.

The bot also supports groups messages and direct messages.

Set up bot

A couple of settings are needed for the bot to communicate with both Slack and VSTS.

1. Goto your Slack site and add a new Bot user and obtain a Slack token.
2. Goto Visual Studio Team Services and obtain a Personal Token a user that has necessary access rights to the work part of VSTS

Use the tokens obtained to start a instance of vsts-slackbot.

Other settings

BotName - Name of the bot in your Slack Directory.
SlackToken - Token obtained with access to Slack.
VSTSToken - Token obtained with access to VSTS
VSTSDomain - The subdomain to your VSTS account

Alternative for VSTS token is to use alternative user credentials. In that case switch VSTSToken with

VSTSUsername - Username to VSTS account
VSTSPassword - Password set as alternative credentials for VSTS account

Run standalone

To run this bot in a console or as a standalone program a config.json file need to be provided at the root folder of the bot. Example of a config.json file

{
    "BotName": "",
    "SlackToken": "",
    "VSTSDomain": "",
    "VSTSToken": "",
}

Run as container

The following command starts a container with the vsts-slackbot. --name and --restart-always are optional.

 docker run -it -d --name <name> --restart=always -e BotName=<name in slack> -e SlackToken=<SlackToken> -e VSTSToken=<VSTSToken> -e VSTSDomain=<VSTSSubDomain> gjermshus/vsts-slackbot:latest