Using Slack Webhook

What do you learn in this post?

• You will learn how to create a Shell script.
• You will learn how to backup up your database by a script.
• You will learn how to automate your script by specif time of day.
• Also, you will learn how to send a message to your Slack channel programmatically.

Overview

Just imagine that you have a Slack channel, and you wanted to get notified when something happened in your Linux/Unix machine. For instance, getting back up of something, or checking disk usage, monitor the network/process, or whatever you want to do in that machine manually. In this case, I assume you want to get a database backup and send a process success or failure message to your one of your Slack channels. Before to start this, you need to have a Slack account. The goal of this post is to take a backup every day and send a message to your Slack channel. Before to start this you need to have Slack

Create Script

• Create your script.sh file in your machine.
• Make your script executable by chmod u+x script.sh
• Add your logic to it. For this case to get backup of MySQL database with mysqldump.

#!/bin/sh

date=`date +%Y%m%d`

mysqldump -h localhost -u root -p pass --single-transaction --quick databasename > jeff/backup/databse${date}.sql

if [ "$?" -eq 0 ]
then
    echo " Script is running - ${date}" >> jeff/dbbackup.log
     curl -X POST -H 'Content-type: application/json' --data '{"channel":"#<your channel name>","text":"<your message here>"}' https://<your-slack-chanel>.slack.com/services/hooks/<your hooks key>
else
    echo "Script failed to run on ${date}" >> jeff/dbbackup.log
    curl -X POST -H 'Content-type: application/json' --data '{"channel":"#<your channel name>","text":"<your message here> "}' https://<your-slack-chanel>.slack.com/services/hooks/<your hookks key>
fi

You need to modify the <your message here>, <your channel name>, <your hooks key with your custom message and Slack webhooks' key. Where to get the key? follow next step

Create Slack Webhook

• Create a Slack account and channel if you don't have it.

• Create a Slack App. Follow this steps.

Add script to Cron jobs.

If you want to schedules a command or script on your server to run automatically at a specified time and date, please read the end of my last post.

Good luck 😉