Enable notifications for work requests

Currently Debusine only supports email notifications and can send notifications when a work request completes. Getting this to work involves setting up a notification channel and configuring the work request to trigger notifications.

Pre-requisites

The Debusine server needs to be able to send emails. By default it uses the local mail transport agent, so either it needs to be configured and working, or you can configure Debusine to use an external SMTP server.

Setting up an email-based notification channel

Notifications channels are created by the Debusine administrator with the debusine-admin create_notification_channel command.

To create a notification channel with the name admin-team and type email (the only supported channel type at the moment) to send emails to admin@example.org you would do:

$ sudo -u debusine-server debusine-admin create_notification_channel admin-team email << EOF
{
  "from": "nobody@example.org",
  "to": ["admin@example.org"]
}
EOF

from and to are required fields. cc (list of emails) and subject are optional fields. The default subject is WorkRequest {work_request_id} completed in {work_request_result}, and the {work_request_id} and {work_request_result} are replaced by the id and result (success, failure or error)

Related commands of create_notification_channel are delete_notification_channel, list_notification_channels or manage_notification_channel. See Manage notification channels.

Configuring a work request with a notification

Once you have a notification channel setup, you can add the --event-reactions option to any work request that you would submit. The key value should be a dictionary mapping an event to a list of channels that must be notified. Right now the supported events are on_failure and on_error.

For instance, with the command below, and with the notification channel configured in the former section, any failure to build the package would result in an email notification to admin@example.org with a copy to qa-team@example.org:

$ cat qa.yaml
on_failure:
- action: send-notification
  channel: admin-team
  data:
    cc: [qa-team@example.org]
    subject: 'Work request ${work_request_id}: result: ${work_request_result}'

$ debusine create-work-request ... --event-reactions qa.yaml

In this case, the main recipients (To field) is defined by the notification channel configuration, but the work request overrides the Cc field (recipients in carbon copy) and the subject (with a templated value that works like the value that can be configured in the notification channel directly).

The possible data fields for email notifications are:

from: a default is provided by the Debusine admin
to: a default is provided by the Debusine admin
subject: a default is provided by the Debusine admin
cc: list of emails