I recently switched a project from a home-grown deployment script to Laravel Envoyer. While the homegrown script could maybe have been adapted it would have taken time, and had to be maintained, and Envoyer offers some useful extras like Slack, Discord, and Microsoft Teams integration, and heartbeat monitoring.
Except we don’t use Slack, Discord, or Teams, we use Zoho‘s Slack competitor, Cliq.
Comparing Slack’s web hooks with Cliq we see that a bot is needed in Cliq, but making one is super-easy, on the order of four or five clicks.
Once there is a bot it can receive web hooks. Figuring out the right way to provide an authentication token was weird, there is not clear documentation, but the reply from Eric Hirst in in the Zoho forum thread announcing Cliq bots has a solution that works.
Now we can receive web hooks, I tried putting the bot’s web hook URL in for both Slack notifications and Discord notifications in Envoyer, and I got notifications. Both systems expect a POSTed JSON object, so that’s what they get. The Discord one is simpler one of the properties is simply markdown text, which Cliq understands, so the Cliq incoming web hook handler needs to grab that markdown text and return it so the bot will post the message in Cliq.
// Configure the bot's incoming webhook URL in any third-party service to trigger this handler.
response = Map();
message = body.toMap();
if(message.containKey('content'))
{
response.put("text",message.get('content'));
// If you want the bot to post to one of your channels, and want it to appear
// as the bot posting, add the bot info like this. Otherwise it the message
// will be "from" the person who owns the auth token, with a small "bot" flag next to it.
response.put('bot',{"name":"Envoyer","image":"https://envoyer.io/img/favicons/apple-touch-icon-120x120.png"});
// If you want to post to a channel this is how. If you don't do this the bot
// will simply post the message to any chats it has open.
zoho.cliq.postToChannel('general',response);
}
return response;
The beauty of simply dumping the markdown into the chat is that this simple code handles all notifications from Envoyer, including successful & failed deployments and heartbeat notifications. You can look for specific text and alter your notification if you want, (I have a big headline for successful deployments), but it’s not needed.
It would be easier to test this if there was a way to trigger a test notification in Envoyer, but Envoyer isn’t really something to tinker with, it’s supposed to just work. It would also be great if Envoyer could support Zoho Cliq directly, but I’m not sure many people in the Laravel community are using Zoho.
So now we have Envoyer notifications in Zoho Cliq in our organization. If you’re one of the few Laravel / Zoho unicorns out there like me you can have them too.