drone.io 0.5 slack no longer working - slack

Question

We had slack notification working in drone.io 0.4 just fine, but since we updated to 0.5 I can't get it working despite trying out the documentation.
Before, it was like this
build:
build and deploy stuff...
notify:
slack:
webhook_url: $$SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL
channel: continuous_integratio
username: drone
You can see here that I used the $$ to reference the special drone config file of old.
Now my latest attempt looks like this
pipeline:
build and deploy stuff...
slack:
image: plugins/slack
webhook: https://hooks.slack.com/services/...
channel: continuous_integratio
username: drone
According to the documentation slack is now indented within the pipeline (previously build) level.
I tried changing slack out for notify like it was before, used the SLACK_WEBHOOK secret only via the drone cli and there where other things I attempted as well.
Does anyone know what I might be doing wrong?

Answer 1

This is an (almost exact) yaml I am using with slack notification enabled with the exception that I've masked the credentials
pipeline:
build:
image: golang
commands:
- go build
- go test
slack:
image: plugins/slack
webhook: https://hooks.slack.com/services/XXXXXXXXX/YYYYYYYYY/ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
when:
status: [ success, failure ]
There is unfortunately nothing in your example that jumps out, perhaps with the exception of the channel name having a typo (although I'm not sure if that represents your real yaml configuration or not)
If you are attempting to use secrets (via the cli) you need to make sure you sign your yaml file and commit the signature file to your repository. You can then reference your secret in the yaml similar to 0.4 but with a slightly different syntax:
pipeline:
build:
image: golang
commands:
- go build
- go test
slack:
image: plugins/slack
webhook: ${SLACK_WEBHOOK}
when:
status: [ success, failure ]
You can read more about secrets at http://readme.drone.io/usage/secret-guide/
You can also invoke the plugin directly from the command line to help test different input values. This can help with debugging. See https://github.com/drone-plugins/drone-slack#usage

Answer 2

The issue was that in 0.4 the notify plugin was located outside the scope of the pipeline (then build) and now since 0.5 its located inside the pipeline. This combined with the fact that when a pipeline fails it quits the scope immediately, which means the slack (then notify) step never get's reached at all anymore.
The solution to this is to just explicitly tell it to execute the step on failure with the when command:
when:
status: [ success, failure ]
This is actually mentioned in the getting-started guide, though, but I didn't go through till the end as I was aiming to quickly get it up and running and didn't worry about what I considered to be edge cases.