Integrate Zendesk Support into your Django app

django-zengo

django-zengo is a Django app that provides conveniences for integrating with Zendesk.

It facilitates receiving webhook updates from Zendesk, detecting new tickets and changes to existing tickets.

Installation

pip install django-zengo

Usage

Configuring the webhook

Zengo comes with a view that processes messages sent by Zendesk and allows you to perform actions upon various Zendesk events.

Expose zengo.views.WebhookView

You need to configure your application to receive the webhook. To do so simply include it in your URL conf:

from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import path

from zengo.views import WebhookView

urlpatterns = [
    path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
    path('zengo/webhook/', WebhookView.as_view())
]

Add required bits to settings.py

You need to tell Zengo how to authenticate with Zendesk:

• ZENDESK_EMAIL is the email of the Zendesk account you will use to interact with the API.
• ZENDESK_TOKEN generated for the user above in the Zendesk web interface.
• ZENDESK_SUBDOMAIN must match the subdomain used in your Zendesk account.

As seen below, you need to specify And you need to set a shared secret so that the webhook view can trust incoming messages from Zendesk:

• ZENGO_WEBHOOK_SECRET generated by your good self; make it long and random!

So, your settings should appear something along the lines of:

ZENDESK_EMAIL = "iamanemail@example.com"
ZENDESK_TOKEN = "<token-from-zendesk-webui>"
ZENDESK_SUBDOMAIN = "example"

ZENGO_WEBHOOK_SECRET = "<replace-me-with-a-great-password>"

Configure Zendesk to send events

Zendesk allows for many integrations, but for the purposes of Zengo we just need to be told when a ticket has been changed.

Log in as an administrator in Zendesk, and visit Settings > Extensions > Targets > add target > HTTP target.

Add an HTTP target with a URL of your service, and choose the POST method. Ensure you've added a secret query parameter to the URL where your webhook is accessible, such that the webhook view can authorize Zendesk's webhook sends.

Next, you must configure a trigger to use the target. Visit Business Rules > Triggers > Add trigger. Add a condition that suits your needs, such as, Ticket is updated, or Ticket is created, and select an action of Notify target, selecting the previously configured target. For JSON body, enter the following:

{
    "id": "{{ ticket.id }}"
}

You're done! Now whenever a ticket is created or updated in Zendesk, you should have an event being processed in your application.

Note: for development, I recommend using the excellent ngrok to proxy requests through to your localhost.

Performing actions upon receiving Zendesk events

When Zengo receives a webhook from Zendesk, it will fetch the latest state of the ticket from Zendesk's APIs, compare how this differs to the state in the local database models, and fire a signal indicating what has happened. In your application, you attach receivers to the signal that is most relevant to your need.

from django.dispatch import receiver

from zengo.signals import ticket_created


@receiver(ticket_created)
def handle_new_ticket(sender, ticket, context, **kwargs):
    # perform your custom action here
    pass

Signals

You can connect to the following signals.

• zengo.signals.ticket_created - fires when a ticket is encountered for the first time.
• zengo.signals.ticket_updated - fires when a ticket previously encountered is changed, or has a new comment added.

Contribute

django-zengo supports a variety of Python and Django versions. It's best if you test each one of these before committing. Our Circle CI Integration will test these when you push but knowing before you commit prevents from having to do a lot of extra commits to get the build to pass.

Environment Setup

In order to easily test on all these Pythons and run the exact same thing that CI will execute you'll want to setup pyenv and install the Python versions outlined in tox.ini.

If you are on Mac OS X, it's recommended you use brew. After installing brew run:

$ brew install pyenv pyenv-virtualenv pyenv-virtualenvwrapper

Then:

pyenv install -s 3.6.10
pyenv install -s 3.7.6
pyenv install -s 3.8.1
pyenv virtualenv zengo 3.8.1
pyenv shell zengo 3.6.10 3.7.6
pip install detox

To run the test suite:

$ detox