Deployment Notifications

~8 min · notifications, slack, alerts

Level 0Apprentice

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Tell the team what happened

Every deploy — successful or not — should leave a footprint in the team's communication channel. The audit trail matters: 'who shipped what when' is the first question after every incident.

Channels

Slack — most common. Use slackapi/slack-github-action with an incoming webhook. Pin the deploy channel.
Discord — webhook-based.
Email — dawidd6/action-send-mail or your own SMTP.
Telegram — bot API; one curl call.
PagerDuty / Opsgenie — for failures only, escalation paths.
GitHub Deployments — every environment-scoped job already creates one. Visible in the Deployments tab and PR.

What a useful message contains

Service name + environment.
Version / SHA being deployed.
Triggering actor (user or bot).
Result (success / failure / cancelled).
Link to the workflow run.
Link to the deployed URL (for verifications).

Failure messages should be louder than success messages — different channel, @mention, or color.

Code

Slack notify on deploy result·yaml

  notify:
    needs: [deploy, smoke]
    if: always()
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Notify Slack
        uses: slackapi/slack-github-action@v2
        with:
          webhook: ${{ secrets.SLACK_DEPLOY_WEBHOOK }}
          webhook-type: incoming-webhook
          payload: |
            {
              "text": "${{ job.status == 'success' && '✅' || '🚨' }} *${{ github.repository }}* deploy ${{ needs.smoke.result || needs.deploy.result }}\n"
                       + "Version: <https://github.com/${{ github.repository }}/commit/${{ github.sha }}|${{ github.sha }}>\n"
                       + "Actor: ${{ github.actor }}\n"
                       + "Run: <${{ github.server_url }}/${{ github.repository }}/actions/runs/${{ github.run_id }}|view>"
            }

External links

slackapi/slack-github-action

Exercise

Add a deploy-result notification to one workflow. Deliberately fail a deploy in staging and verify the failure message includes the SHA, actor, and a link to the run. Then succeed and verify the success message also fires.