Schedule Slack messages and daily digests

Post to any Slack channel on a schedule: a standup digest, a reminder, a daily number, or an announcement. cronservices sends the message through an incoming webhook, so there's no bot to host, and it can fill the message in from any API first.

#Example: a daily Slack reminder

The simplest job: a message every weekday at 09:30 in your time zone.

{
  "name": "Standup reminder",
  "cron": { "expression": "30 9 * * 1-5", "time_zone": "America/New_York" },
  "nodes": [
    { "id": "post", "slack_send_message": {
        "webhook_url": "https://hooks.slack.com/services/T000/B000/XXXX",
        "text": ":wave: Standup in 15 minutes. Post your update in the thread." } }
  ]
}

#Example: open pull requests before standup

Fetch data, turn it into lines, and post it. The join function writes a list as text, one item per line:

{
  "name": "Open PRs to #eng",
  "cron": { "expression": "0 9 * * 1-5", "time_zone": "Europe/Berlin" },
  "nodes": [
    { "id": "prs", "github_list_pull_requests": { "credential_id": "YOUR_GITHUB_CREDENTIAL_ID", "owner": "acme", "repo": "web", "state": "open" } },
    { "id": "lines", "transform": { "template": "{ \"count\": \"{{ $.length }}\", \"lines\": { \"{{#each $}}\": \"• <{{ $.html_url }}|#{{ $.number }}> {{ $.title }}\" } }" } },
    { "id": "post", "slack_send_message": {
        "webhook_url": "https://hooks.slack.com/services/T000/B000/XXXX",
        "text": "*{{ $.count }} open pull requests*\n{{ join($.lines, \"\\n\") }}" } }
  ]
}

#Set up

1. Create a Slack app at api.slack.com/apps, turn on Incoming Webhooks, and add a webhook to the channel.
2. Copy the https://hooks.slack.com/services/… URL into webhook_url. Treat it as a secret: anyone with it can post to the channel.
3. To read messages with slack_channel_history, give the app a bot token with channels:history and save it as a bearer_token credential.

To send Slack's richer Block Kit layouts, use a request step that posts your own blocks JSON to the same webhook.

#Reference

#Send a Slack message: slack_send_message

Sends POST to the incoming webhook URL with {"text": …}. Output for the next step: The text ok.

#Read a Slack channel: slack_channel_history

Sends GET https://slack.com/api/conversations.history. Output for the next step: Slack's response: messages (newest first), each with text, user and ts.

#More ideas

• Post yesterday's signups from your analytics API every morning: 0 8 * * *.
• Announce who's on call from PagerDuty: 0 9 * * MON.
• Post past-due Stripe subscriptions each weekday.
• Remind the team about timesheets on the last weekday of the month: 0 15 LW * *.
• Post a weather brief for a field crew at 05:30 local time.