How Do You Set Up GitHub Actions to Send Notifications to Slack?

Check out the Slack and GitHub documentation about permissions. It mentions that if the email isn’t set to public on GitHub, you'll get `null` for the email field. You’ll also run into issues if a user’s primary email is personal and not their organizational one. For us, we mute direct message bots and channel notifications instead, which makes it less intrusive.

To bridge Slack and GitHub accounts, we maintain a mapping of GitHub usernames to Slack handles. We use Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Terraform to inject this mapping into GitHub variables. This way, our Slack notification action can replace the usernames correctly before posting messages.

Have you considered using the GitHub app for Slack? It handles a lot of notifications automatically. Users can subscribe to PRs, and you'll get notifications about commits, PRs, deployments, etc., directly in a channel. Plus, if users log into the GitHub app in Slack, it syncs GitHub usernames to Slack names, making it easier.

Our setup sends notifications through a pub/sub system, which interfaces with different services. It's a bit complex, but it has the flexibility to route messages wherever they're needed in our engineering team.

We typically use a generic inbox for pipeline notifications and a fixed Slack webhook for important messages. For notifications aimed at the PR author, I just leave a comment on their PR. That way, GitHub sends them an email as well.