Thinking about doing an Integration with Slack

Has anyone else considered this?

All I really want is updates to tickets and boards to show up in the chat channel we are all hanging out in.

My main question is, why isn't there a simple way to have YouTrack programmatically notify me of changes?

Looks like my choices are either do something with CORS hooked into the page that would post to Slack or either use Jabber or email to get the notifications then write some code that pulls them out and sends them on to Slack?

Hope I am missing something. Looked at the API documentation pretty extensively.

Thanks.
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Hello Rob,

Sorry for not responding earlier!
As far as I can see, this can be configured under Groups> Add service integrations. Then you may add RSS feed on target saved search from YouTrack.

Thank you.
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Hi Andrey:

This sounds promising. But searching around in circles for information about how to turn  a query into an RSS feed in YouTrack.. ugh. Some simple documentation and a link to it would be nice.

Thanks,
Rob
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OK, spent a stupid amount of time on this. I figured out how to construct a query to show issues for a particular board, but not how to turn that into an RSS feed. The documentation, if it does exist about this, is somehow completely hidden from my view and Google's. Frankly, this is a bad solution because we will have to come back and make a new query each time we make a new board. Since we are doing continuous delivery, that's quite often.

Really, we don't need a philosopher to conclude that undocumented features are pretty much useless, unless someone wants to sink the time into finding them. But hell, I could have written an integration in the amount of time wasted today.
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Hi Rob,

Did you search for this in Slack's documentation?
As far as you can see, there is nothing to configure on YouTrack's side. To tell the truth, I'm new to Slack and configured it just to check your case.
Another way I've found to achieve this is to add Google Hangouts integration and receive notifications on issue changes from our Jabber-bot to your Hangouts account. This works.
But you're right, nice case to be added in our documentation.

Thank you.
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OMG, Andrey you are killing me. I say in my message what I was unable to find was documentation on how to turn a saved search into an RSS feed?? also what would the URL would be?? That's not in the Slack documentation?? It should be in the YouTrack documentation but I was not able to find it.

Ugh... another day probably now... :(
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Rob,

Nope. I'm not a killer, you know, I'm an engineer.
To have a look at the RSS url, just click on 'Issues feed' at the bottom of Issues list page.
In your case, you may turn to RSS query like:
Fix version: Test <State> 

to get updates on issues from the sprint with several more parameters.

Thank you.
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Ok finally, got the RSS feed but alas, pasted it into chrome and it comes up, but pasting it into Slack, it says 'this does not look like a feed.'
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Please, provide me with the RSS url you use.
Why don't you use Google Hangouts integration for this task? You need to create special Hangouts account, add your YouTrack jabber-bot to contacts; configure YouTrack jabber-bot notifications on target saved search. After that, you'll be able to add this special Hangouts account in Slack.
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Sounds like a good idea, but the Hangouts integration Slack offers goes the other way: it lets you invoke hangouts from inside Slack. I don't see how Slack will make a hangout bot's messages appear, though I certainly agree it should. That's what I suggested to the Slack guy.
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Rob,

Even though, according to your use-case, invoking Hangouts inside Slack shouldn't confuse you. In other words, the option is acceptable by your scenario. Am I missing something?

Still, what was the RSS url?

Thank you.
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Oh, thanks for your thoughtful reply. Yeah it's my confusion that's making this difficult.

Read the provided documentation. The integration is so that I can use slash commands to start hangouts from within the slack window. Exactly how is that going to bring updates into the window on a realtime basis??
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Rob,

It works is same way as notifications by email do. Have a look at instructions. To configure both- Jabber and Email notifications, navigate to Profile> Filters and Notifications. Notifications will be received on target saved search, on target triggers.

Thank you.
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Andrey:

I know that YouTrack can do it's part of the Hangouts integration. What I am saying is if you read the Slack documentation about Hangouts, you will see that it's merely a way to invoke it using slash commands.

What I don't understand is why the Slack guys didn't implement XMPP and just let you send messages then have some simple rules that determine which ones go to which channel.

I am thinking the BEST solution is to write a little bit of code that polls the YouTrack RSS feed for ALL issues, then has a simple map of project codes to channels. Thinking about doing that with Akka and Play. Maybe a day of work.
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Rob,

Just going to put my two cents in. It is a shame that Slack don't have YouTrack or TeamCity integrations available but it is also a shame that TeamCity and YouTrack don't have Webhooks straight out of the box. TeamCity has an open source plugin for WebHooks that we use to integrate to slack but there doesn't seem to be this option with YouTrack.

I just wanted to pick you up on the point you made about XMPP not being in slack. Go to your https://<yourteam>.slack.com/account/gateways you should be able to enable XMPP and IRC support there. I think we might use that for slack and youtrack integration.

Matt
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+1 for webhooks, that way a proper slack/zapier or whatever integration could be done.
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I made the unfortunate choice to do a rather complete integration with slack. I check the feed every minute then if there are new items, I call the various REST services to get the details. I say unfortunate because the implementation of these services is not lacking, it's anemic and leaky to the extreme.

That said, after a few weeks with a working plugin, I would quit before going back to none.

If you are interested, it's here.
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Thanks for sharing! Although, I think we have a better /event REST API call for fetching changes. It has only 2 parameters: int "maxResults" and boolean "compact". Not a documented feature, but it will be preserved in some form for sure.
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@Pavel Nikitin can you share the info or at least say, if there is a plan to document this hidden functionality some time?
But even though an API call is a good option, but webhooks work in a different way, they send out info as soon, as something gets updated/inserted/deleted and we do not have to poll youtrack API every time.
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Wow that's great to hear! INSANE!! Actually, as ugly as the existing interface is, once it's done, who really cares. If you have not used a chat app like Slack that has plugins with real integration, it will totally transform the way you work.
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We are thinking about a major API redesign, but old API will likely be available too. Redesigned API should be documented and is planned for YouTrack 7.0.
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good to know, thx
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Any update on this? We already have almost all of our internal tools publishing changes to slack, the only missing is youtrack. i already created successfully a RSS integration with the URL feed and the user&password (if you miss this part you get the "This don't look like a feed') but no updates show in the slack channel ...
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Well, just for the record, the RSS integration works with Slack after all, I don't know if it's the first time but took almost an hour to show the new item in slack ...
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I'm interested to know what you mean by "integration with the URL feed and User & Password).  I get the error telling me it doesn't look like a feed, and I don't see any options to validate the feed with a user/password anywhere?  Or is this a separate API user/pass somewhere to allow integrations at all?  Any help would be appreciated - just trying to pull an RSS feed.
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Dude, I already did a complete integration? mentioned that on the thread, it's on GitHub if you want to use it. Someone went and got it today and installed it and started using it.
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Awesome!  Thanks for your reply man - I'll give this a try and get back to you!
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Sure. We have been using it for months. It works and it's immediate. The guy who got it today had a couple good suggestions that he made into issues. I will fix them this weekend.
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Thanks, the problem for me is that I'm using youtrack on the cloud, so I don't have any server (at least one that I can maintain running without supervision) to install the plugin. Thanks anyway
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