Hacky Slack is a shell script that will post messages to a Slack webhook API endpoint.

From Slack:

Incoming Webhooks are a simple way to post messages from external sources into Slack. They make use of normal HTTP requests with a JSON payload, which includes the message and a few other optional details described later. Message Attachments (https://api.slack.com/docs/attachments) can also be used in Incoming Webhooks to display richly-formatted messages that stand out from regular chat messages.

Why is it called Hacky Slack? First, this reflects my "hacking" something together that accomplished my goals. Second, I played a ton of Hacky Sack (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacky_Sack) when I was a teenager.

There are two goal of Hacky Slack. The first was to was to create a generic shell client for the Slack messaging API. The second was to take advantage of the Slack messaging interface to allow applications, like Monit, to style its events. In support of both goals Hacky Slack offers customizations for external applications, like Monit, via external config files (See the Monit example).

Also, in support of having more compelling Slack messages, a small collection of icons were created. The icons are meant to provide visual cues to the user so they can more easily identify the context of a message they received in Slack.

First, you need to get yourself a Slack account. Go to the Slack webite: https://slack.com/

Second, you need create an incoming webhook. Go here to learn how: https://api.slack.com/incoming-webhooks

As a result going through those two steps, you should get the following:

You need to make sure that your Slack token is set as a system variable ${SLACK_TOKEN} or you can pass it to Hacky Slack via -k "whatever-you-get-from-slack". You can also hard code it into slack.sh as TOKEN="whatever-you-get-from-slack"

Hacky Slack will default to the Slack API endpoint URL https://hooks.slack.com/services/. However, if you want to use a different one simply pass it via -w "https://whatever.slack.com/provides/"

Hacky Slack requires cURL (https://curl.haxx.se). Most systems have it installed. However, if you are running Hacky Slack in Docker cURL may not be installed.

Installation is pretty simple. Just copy the slack.sh to /usr/local/bin. Then chmod +x /usr/local/bin/slack.sh.

Please note that the default config (slack.sh) assumes you are installing slack into /usr/local/bin:

APP="/usr/local/bin/slack.sh"
BIN="/usr/bin/slack"

BIN is used to ln to APP to BIN. This will allow you to use slack vs /usr/local/bin/slack.sh

If you decide to copy Hacky Slack to a different APP directory change the settings accordingly.

Hacky Slack allowed you to pass a variety attributes as defined by the Slack messaging specs:

-a, Attachment      Sends a messages as an attachment."
-A, Author          Small text used to display the author's name."
-b, Author Link     A URL that will hyperlink the author_name text mentioned above. (Author name is required)."
-B, Author Icon     A URL that displays a small image to the left of the author_name text.(Author name is required)."
-c, Channel         The location the messages should be delivered. Use # or @ to prefix (#general or @joe)"
-C, Color           This value is used to color the border along the left side of the message attachment."
-h, Help            Show the command options for Slack."
-i, Icon            A URL to an image file that will be displayed inside a message attachment."
-I, Image           Small text used to display the author's name."
-m, Mode            Mode toggles application specific behaviors (e.g., preconfigured Monit settings)."
-N, Thumbnail       A URL to an image file that will be displayed as a thumbnail on the right side of a message attachment."
-p, Pretext         This is optional text that appears above the message attachment block."
-s, Status          An optional value that can either be one of ok, info, warn or error."
-t, Text            This is the main text in a message attachment, and can contain standard message markup."
-T, Title           The title is displayed as larger, bold text near the top of a message attachmen."
-L, Title Link      A valid URL in the will ensure the title text will be hyperlinked."
-k, Token           Authenticates the POST to Slack."
-u, Username        User that posts the message."
-w, Webhook         The Slack API service endpoint to POST messages. Defaults to 'https://hooks.slack.com/services/'"

For more information on the above parameters, please check out the Slack docs:

• https://api.slack.com/docs/formatting
• https://api.slack.com/docs/attachments

The channel is "general" with username "hacky-slack". The icon is "apple" and the author is "apple". The author name is linked to "apple.com" and the text sent in the message is "Where are the new 2016 Macbook models?"

slack -c "#general" -u "hacky-slack" -i "apple" -a "Macbook" -b "http://www.apple.com/ -t "Where are the new 2016 Macbook models?"

Here is a sample message and a screenshot of the message with various flags set.

slack -a -t "Hello World" -i ":slack:" -T "Titles are awesome" -p "Pretext is so helpful to include" -s "info"

Here is the command represented in Slack:

Note: These examples assume you have set your token and webhook endpoint.

Monit is a system monitoring and recovery tool. More on Monit here: https://mmonit.com/monit/

Hacky Slack was initially conceived to provide better support for Monit within Slack, especially customizing the Slack message UI to reflect smarter Monit events. Also, using Monit event variables in a Slack message allowed Hacky Slack the ability to trigger messages with minimal user input. This also means greater consistency for Monit messages as it ensures a common messaging approach across teams and systems.

Here is an example error message from Monit:

Notice the icon and matching message color highlight. Also, the content of each message, when triggered by Monit, is automatically populated.

This is accomplished by using Monit variables to populate specific parts of the Slack message:

USERNAME="monit @ ${IP}"
TITLE="${MONIT_SERVICE}"
TEXT="${MONIT_DESCRIPTION}"
PRETEXT="${MONIT_DATE} | ${MONIT_HOST}: ${MONIT_EVENT}"
FALLBACK="${MONIT_DATE} | ${MONIT_HOST}: ${MONIT_EVENT}"

The message will visually change based on the use of the status flag -s. Based on the -s passed to Hacky Slack, one of 4 treatments will be applied to the message:

Icon	Name
	Monit OK -s "ok"
	Monit INFO -s "info"
	Monit WARN -s "warn"
	Monit ERROR -s "error"

In a future release, the look and feel can be tailored to the specific Monit event. For example, if there is a network event, then Hack Slack would customize the message to reflect that event type by using a specific set of icons and colors. At the moment, the 4 events above are the only customizations that are active.

Below is a Monit statement triggers an alert if the memory exceeds 15MB for 2 cycles. It will repeat the alert every 3 cycles. Once the condition that triggered the alert returns to normal, Monit will issue an all clear message to Slack.

if memory > 15 MB for 2 cycles then exec /usr/bin/bash -c "sh /usr/local/bin/slack.sh -a -c #testing -s error -M monit >> /ebs/logs/foo.log 2<&1" repeat every 3 cycles else if succeeded then exec /usr/bin/bash -c "sh /usr/local/bin/slack.sh -a -c #testing -s ok -M monit >> /ebs/logs/foo.log 2<&1"

The -a flag sets the attachment flag. This is the expanded message format seen above. The -c flag sets the channel to deliver the message to. In this case the channel is "#testing". The -s flag sets the status the message should inherit. The example above uses "error" and ok". Lastly, the -M flag is set to "monit". This tells Hacky Slack to use the Monit config.

Here is an example for monitoring crond:

check process crond with pidfile "/var/run/crond.pid"
      start program = "/etc/init.d/crond start" with timeout 60 seconds
      stop program = "/etc/init.d/crond stop"
      if 2 restarts within 3 cycles then exec /usr/bin/bash -c "sh /usr/local/bin/slack.sh -a -c #testing -s error -M monit" repeat every 3 cycles else if succeeded then exec /usr/bin/bash -c "sh /usr/local/bin/slack.sh -a -c #testing -s ok -M monit"
      if 5 restarts within 5 cycles then timeout

Hacky Slack can be extended to support other applications besides Monit. For example, Nagios monitoring or Cron. Really, any application can send messages via Hacky Slack.

Since no user (- u) was specified it will default to using the host system IP address

Included are various Slack themed icons (<code?/icons/png). The icons are sized at (128x128) to meet Slack requirements. To use these icons they need to be added via the Slack application UI and referenced in the command line flag -i. More icons will be added over time.

Icon	Name
	AWS ElastiCache
	AWS RDS
	AWS Redshift

Icon	Name
	bug OK
	bug INFO
	bug WARN
	bug ERROR

Icon	Name
	Code

Icon	Name
	CPU OK
	CPU INFO
	CPU WARN
	CPI ERROR

Icon	Name
	Cron OK
	Cron WARN
	Cron ERROR

Icon	Name
	Disk

Icon	Name
	MEM OK
	MEM INFO
	MEM WARN
	MEM ERROR

Icon	Name
	Database Check
	Integration
	Stop
	Stop 2

Hacky Slack was inspired by the following resources:

• https://www.jverdeyen.be/devops/monit-slack-notifications/
• https://github.com/course-hero/slacktee
• https://github.com/rockymadden/slack-cli
• https://api.slack.com/community
• https://mmonit.com/wiki/MMonit/SlackNotification
• Icons courtesy of http://iconmonstr.com and AWS

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