Peacock

Show off with minimal effort

peacock is a simple CI/CD tool for telling your users what you're up to. It integrates with existing pipelines to fire out notifications to your users without having to collate and write release notes.

Overview

Peacock works by parsing the contents of the description of a Pull Request and converting that into notifications to be sent to users - making it easy for developers to communicate release information. Peacock supports sending multiple messages to different teams allowing you to curate your release notes based on the audience.

• Easy to set up and integrate
• Supports multiple methods of communications
• Can send multiple messages to multiple teams all from one PR

Installation

Local

To run Peacock on your local machine:

git clone https://github.com/spring-financial-group/peacock.git
make install

CI/CD

To run Peacock in a CI/CD pipeline:

- image: mqubeoss.azurecr.io/spring-financial-group/peacock:latest

Checkout our pipeline definitions for an example of how it can be used.

Configuration

Feathers

Peacock's feathers are each way that you'd like to communicate with your users. These are stored in .peacock/feathers.yaml in the repository that you'd like Peacock to run in.

Each team in the feathers needs to have a contactType and some addresses which define how your users will be contacted. See Communication Methods for all the methods supported by Peacock.

teams:
  - name: QA
    contactType: slack
    addresses:
    - C56H7G209DF
  - name: FrontEnd
    contactType: webhook
    addresses:
      - john.smith@google.com
      - tom.allen@github.com
  - name: BackEnd
    contactType: slack
    addresses:
      - C56H7G209DF
  - name: Business
    contactType: slack
    addresses:
      - C56H7G209DF

Environment Variables

Environment variables are used configure Peacock in a pipeline. For integrating into different CI/CD tools the keys for these variables can be overridden using flags for each command.

Variable	Description	Required	Overwrite Flag
PR_NUMBER	The number of the Pull Request.	Required when using --dry-run	pr-number-key
GITHUB_TOKEN	The token to use for authentication with GitHub	Always	git-token-key
REPO_OWNER	The owner of the repository	If not passed then value is retrieved from the local git instance	git-owner-key
REPO_NAME	The name of the repository	If not passed then value is retrieved from the local git instance	git-repo-key
GIT_SERVER	The domain of the git server	Default is https://github.com	git-server-key
SLACK_TOKEN	The token used to authenticate with Slack	Only if the slack communication method is defined in the feathers	slack-token-key
WEBHOOK_URL	The URL that Peacock will post to	Only if the webhook communication method is defined in the feathers	webhook-URL-key
WEBHOOK_SECRET	The secret used to authenticate Peacock	Only if the webhook communication method is defined in the feathers	webhook-HMAC-secret-key

Communication Methods

Slack

To use Slack as a method of communication a Slack app will need to be setup for your organisation with the minimum scope of chat:write. It's important to remember that for private channels your app will need to be invited for Peacock to post messages.

Although Peacock does convert Markdown to Slack's implementation, due to Slack only supporting a mild version of Markdown this conversion is limited.

Webhook

Peacock offers a webhook so that it can be intergrated with your own communication method. When a notification is sent peacock will send an HTTP POST request to the configured webhook URL with the following JSON body:

{
   "body": "string",
   "subject": "string",
   "addresses": [
      "string"
   ]
}

To authenticate the request Peacock sends a X-Signature-256 header with the request. This is a HMAC digest of the request body using the SHA-256 hash function and the webhook secret as the key.

Peacock converts the GitHub markdown to HTML before sending the request.

Usage

Peacock uses Notify headers (### Notify) in the description of a PR to identify messages and teams to contact. Additional information about the PR can be added as long as it is above the first Notify header - otherwise it will be included in one of the messages.

Example PR description:

# Production Release PR
Here is some text that won't be sent in any of the messages.

### Notify QA, FrontEnd, BackEnd
# Service Promotions

**Services Being Promoted**
* Peacock

**What functionality is being released?**
* A really cool dev tool that lets you communicate release notes to your users more easily

**Risk Of Release**
Low

### Notify Business
# New Software Release
We have just promoted a new tool that will let us more easily inform you of any future releases that we make.

We will be using this from now on to communicate any really cool features that we add to the platform.

Pre-submission

Use the command peacock run --dry-run pre-submission to validate the messages and check that all the right information was supplied for Peacock to run. Adding the --comment-validation flag means that Peacock will post a breakdown of the messages back to the PR as a comment.

The Pull Request number needs to be provided for Peacock to run pre-submission.

Post-submission

Use the command peacock run post-submission to actually send the messages to the different teams.

User Guide

1. Open a PR in repository as normal and add a Notify header to the PR description containing the teams you would like to notify (comma separated). The teams you can choose from, and their method of contact, are stored in .peacock/feathers.yaml in the repository.
2. Underneath the Notify header add the content of the message you would like to send. Keep in mind that some methods of contact support only a limited form of markdown - Slack.
3. Once opened, the peacock dry run pipeline will run. This parses and validates the teams & messages, posting an explanation back to the PR if it fails.
4. Once the PR merges the peacock release pipeline starts. This is the pipeline that actually sends the notifications.