Get a DM in Slack when mentioned in a Jira Comment!

What is this App?

Read about how Group Nine created an application that sends us direct messages in Slack when we get mentioned in Jira comments: https://medium.com/group-nine-media-product-team/slack-notifications-for-jira-comments-1d57879bc149

Setup Instructions

step by step video on YouTube

To setup this application you'll need:

• A Heroku account
• Admin access to your Slack instance
• Admin access to your Jira instance (this setup assumes you're using Jira Cloud)

1. Setup a Slack application

• Go to https://api.slack.com/apps and click "Create New App"
• Provide an Application Name ("Jira Comment Bot" seems to work well), and choose your Slack workspace from the dropdown
• Click "Bot Users" in the "Features" section of the left-side navigation and then click "Add a Bot User"
• Give your bot a display name and default user name and click "Add Bot User"
• Go to "OAuth & Permissions" in the "Features section of the left-side navigation" and click "Install App to Workspace" (click Authorize on the confirmation screen)
• Take note of the OAuth Access Token and Bot User OAuth Access Token, we'll need this later

2. Create a Private / Public RSA Keypair for the Jira Application

• To create the key pair, open your terminal and type openssl genrsa -out privkey.pem 2048
• To extract the public key, type the following into your terminal openssl rsa -pubout -in privkey.pem -out pubkey.pem
• Open privkey.pem in your favorite text editor (privkey.pem should have been generated by the previous steps)
• Go to https://www.base64encode.org/ and paste the contents of privkey.pem into the top section and click "Encode"
• Take note of the base64 encoded string that was generated in the bottom section

3. Setup the app on Heroku

• Create an account on Heroku: https://signup.heroku.com/ (a free solution for hosting applications)  - Click this deploy button to deploy this app to Heroku 👉 

• When asked to enter values for environment variables, do the following...

  • APP_URL = the URL of this heroku application ("https://WHATEVER-YOU-NAMED-THIS.herokuapp.com/") the trailing slash is important
  • JIRA_URL = the URL of your Jira application ("https://YOUR-JIRA-SUBDOMAIN.atlassian.net") the lack of a trailing slash is important
  • RSA_PRIVATE_KEY = the base64 encoded string from step 2
  • SLACKBOT_TOKEN = the Bot User OAuth Access Token from step 1
  • SLACKBOT_OAUTH_TOKEN = the OAuth Access Token from step 1

4. Setup a Jira Application Link

• Go to https://YOUR-JIRA-SUBDOMAIN.atlassian.net/plugins/servlet/applinks/listApplicationLinks

• Enter the URL of your heroku app and click "Create New Link" (if you get a "no response" error, just click Continue)

  • Application Name = whatever you'd like, or just use "Jira Comments in Slack"
  • Application Type = Generic Application
  • Service Provider Name = whatever you'd like
  • Consumer Key = "neptune-the-dodle"
  • Shared Secret = base64 encoded privatekey from step 2
  • Request Token URL, Access Token URL, and Authorize URL = https://YOUR-HEROKU-APP-NAME.herokuapp.com/auth/atlassian-oauth
  • Click "Continue"

• Click the Edit button next to your newly created apllication link in the list

• Go to the Incoming Authentication section in the modal

  • Consumer Key = "neptune-the-dodle"
  • Consumer Name = whatever you'd like users to see when they auth with Jira ("Jira Comment Bot" could work)
  • Description = optional description of what this app does
  • Public Key = copy and paste the contents of pubkey.pem from step 2
  • Consumer Callback URL = https://YOUR-HEROKU-APP-NAME.herokuapp.com/auth/atlassian-oauth/callback/

5. Setup Jira Webhook for Comments

• Go to https://YOUR-JIRA-SUBDOMAIN.atlassian.net/plugins/servlet/webhooks
• Click "Create a Webhook"
  • Name = whatever you want ("Jira Comment Bot" could work)
  • Status = enabled
  • URL = https://YOUR-HEROKU-APP-NAME.herokuapp.com/comment-created
  • Check off "created" in the Comment section
  • Scroll down and click "Create"

6. Add Features to Slack App

• Go back the Slack Application that you setup in step 1 (https://api.slack.com/apps, select your app from the list) and go to "Interactive Components" on the left-side navigation
  • Enter "https://YOUR-HEROKU-APP-NAME.herokuapp.com/response-from-slack" in the "Request URL" field & save
• Go to "Event Subscriptions" in the "Request URL" field enter, https://YOUR-HEROKU-APP-NAME.herokuapp.com/msg-wake-up
  • Subscribe to the message.im event in the "Subscribe to Workspace Events" section

7. Sign Up

• Sign up by messaging the bot you created with the word "signup" -- click the link that the bot responds with to Auth with Jira

8. Usage

• @mention your username in a Jira comment to get a message in Slack

Development

• When working locally, create a .env file in your local environment with the same Key=Value pairs that were used in Step 3 separated by new lines. Example: JIRA_URL='https://YOUR-URL.atlassian.net'
• Start up Mongo with mongod in your terminal
• Install the heroku CLI to start your development environment with heroku local web