Azure Repos with Slack

Azure DevOps Services

If you use Slack, you can use the Azure Repos app for Slack to easily monitor your Azure Repos repositories. You can set up and manage subscriptions to receive notifications in your channel whenever code is pushed/checked in and whenever a pull request (PR) is created, updated or a merge is attempted. This app supports both Git and Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) events.

Read this article to learn how to:

Prerequisites

• To create subscriptions in a Slack channel for repository-related events, you must be a member of the Project Administrators group, or a team administrator. To get added, see Change project-level permissions or Add a team administrator.
• To receive notifications, the Third-party application access via OAuth setting must be enabled for the organization. See Change application access policies for your organization.

Add the Azure Repos app to your Slack workspace

1. Navigate to the Azure Repos Slack app to install the Azure Repos app to your Slack workspace.

2. Once added, you'll see a welcome message from the app as shown in the following image.

   

3. Use the /azrepos Slack handle to interact with the app. A full list of commands is provided in the Command reference section of this article.

Connect the Azure Repos app to your repositories

1. Once the app has been installed in your Slack workspace, connect and authenticate yourself to Azure Repos using /azrepos signin command.

   

2. To start monitoring all Git repositories in a project, use the following slash command inside a channel:

   /azrepos subscribe [project url]
   

   The project URL can be to any page within your project (except URLs to repositories).

   For example:

   /azrepos subscribe https://dev.azure.com/myorg/myproject/
   

   You can also monitor a specific repository using the following command:

   /azrepos subscribe [repository url]
   

   The repository URL can be to any page within your repository that has your repository name.

   For example, for Git repositories, use:

   /azrepos subscribe https://dev.azure.com/myorg/myproject/_git/myrepository
   

   For TFVC repositories, use:

   /azrepos subscribe https://dev.azure.com/myorg/myproject/_versionControl
   

   Note

   You can subscribe only to public repositories.

3. The subscribe command gets you started with a default subscription. For Git repositories, the channel is subscribed to the Pull request created event (with target branch = master), and for TFVC repositories, the channel is subscribed to the Code checked in event.

   

Manage subscriptions

To view, add and remove subscriptions for a channel, use the subscriptions command:

/azrepos subscriptions    

This command lists all the current subscriptions for the channel and allows you to add new subscriptions or remove existing ones. When adding subscriptions, you can customize the notifications you get by using various filters, as described in the following section.

[!NOTE] Team administrators aren't able to remove or modify subscriptions created by Project administrators.

Using filters effectively to customize subscriptions

When a user subscribes to a repository using /azrepos subscribe command, a default subscription is created. Often, users have the need to customize these subscriptions. For example, users may want to get notified only when PRs have a specific reviewer.

The following steps demonstrate how to customize subscriptions.

1. Run the /azrepos subscriptions command.
2. In the list of subscriptions, if there is a subscription that is unwanted or must be modified (Example: creating noise in the channel), select the Remove button.
3. Select the Add subscription button.
4. Select the required repository and the desired event.
5. Select the appropriate filters to customize your subscription.

Example: Get notifications only when my team is in the reviewer list for a PR

Example: Tell me when merge attempts fail due to a policy violation

Previews of pull request URLs

When a user pastes the URL of a PR, a preview is shown like the one in the following image. This helps to keep PR-related conversations contextual and accurate.

For this feature to work, users have to be signed-in. Once they are signed in, this feature will work for all channels in a workspace.

Remove subscriptions and repositories from a channel

• Many a time, users want to clean up their channel by removing repositories and subscriptions. Use the below command to achieve the same.

    /azrepos unsubscribe all [project url]
  

  For example:

    /azrepos unsubscribe all https://dev.azure.com/myorg/myproject
  

This command will delete all the subscriptions related to any repository in the project and removes the repositories from the channel. Only project admins can run this command.

Command reference

The following table lists all the /azrepos commands you can use in your Slack channel.

Notifications in Private channels

The Azure Repos app can help you monitor the repository events in your private channels as well. You will need to invite the bot to your private channel by using /invite @azrepos. Post that, you can set up and manage your notifications the same way as you would for a public channel.

Troubleshooting

If you are experiencing the following errors when using the Azure Repos App for Slack, follow the procedures in this section.

• Sorry, something went wrong. Please try again.
• Configuration failed. Please make sure that the organization '{organization name}' exists and that you have sufficient permissions.

Sorry, something went wrong. Please try again.

The Azure Repos app uses the OAuth authentication protocol, and requires Third-party application access via OAuth for the organization to be enabled. To enable this setting, navigate to Organization Settings > Security > Policies, and set the Third-party application access via OAuth for the organization setting to On.

Configuration failed. Please make sure that the organization '{organization name}' exists and that you have sufficient permissions.

Sign out of Azure DevOps by navigating to https://aka.ms/VsSignout using your browser.

Open an In private or incognito browser window and navigate to https://aex.dev.azure.com/me and sign in. In the dropdown under the profile icon to the left, select the directory that contains the organization containing the repository to which you wish to subscribe.

In the same browser, start a new tab, navigate to https://slack.com, and sign in to your work space (use web client). Run the /azrepos signout command followed by the /azrepos signin command.

Select the Sign in button and you'll be redirected to a consent page like the one in the following example. Ensure that the directory shown beside the email is same as what was chosen in the previous step. Accept and complete the sign in process.

If these steps don't resolve your authentication issue, reach out to us at Developer Community.

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