Monitor your Netlify builds with Slack Webhooks

In a recent episode of the excellent Learn with Jason show, I discovered a term shared by Ben Ilegbodu: div ops.

The term refers to a form of dev ops applied to front-end development. Once purely focused on HTML and CSS, front-end development now indeed covers a wide range of topics from design to tooling and other webpack delicacies.

This reminded me of a recent need I faced after delivering a production-ready project to a client.

Part of the project was the build an admin interface for my clients in order for them to manage their whole content and publish as they wish. I built the admin site with Sanity with a dashboard action triggering a Netlify build process for the public-facing site built with Gatsby.

In order to keep an eye on the build status, I turned to Netlify to enable email notification in case of build failure. But it appeared email and Slack notifications were part of their paid plan, which I have not.

However webhooks are part of their free plan and Zapier soon appeared as the ideal middle man to handle the situation. It actually already has a recipe for it.

This first step is to create a new build hook in your Netlify settings, which gives you a URL as follows

1https://api.netlify.com/build_hooks/xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Then head back to Zapier, select your build event (failed in my case) and the Slack channel to post to.

Congratulations, you are now one step ahead of your next production maelstrom!