Most of the time developers don’t work alone (even if you love it) instead, there is a whole team behind you formed by BAs, QAs, PO, and more. How to let all of them know when a new feature is deployed and ready to be “tested”?
Of course, you can notify everyone via slack, but come on… we are developers, we like things automated. 😄
If you use Heroku to host your app and want to notify your team about a change via slack, this post is for you.
I have tested many tools to do this, but none of them have satisfied my desire to have something functional in minutes... until I found a tool called ActivityTo Go. Activity To Go provides a free plan option which is fully functional and has no limits! that’s so cool.
In order to install it, you need to go to your Heroku app dashboard, then Resources tab, in the “Add on” section type “Activity…”
I started with the free plan, but there are fee based options, each with different features. So choose what works for you.
Next step is to open the “Activity To Go” plugin, and set a new Subscription
Here you should choose a nickname for your app, I like to use the app name and the environment in which it is deployed, for instance: Development, Staging, Production. Then check the “Release” option to notify your team about changes in your server, like a new release, provision to new add-ons, or changes in your environment variables.
And that’s all!
Your team should get notified each time a new release is made, that way everyone can be aware of upcoming changes in the environment. If you want to test if the subscription is working, no need to do a new release to verify its working, you can test it by sending a ping from the Actions dropdown.
Enjoy.