Tech Docs Template - page expiry notifier

This repo is part of the tech-docs-template, and is used in conjunction with the page expiry feature that is part of the tech-docs-gem

GitHub Actions will run the script once a day during weekdays. It will look at the pages API for your site, find all pages that have expired, and post a Slack message to the owner of each page to let them know that it needs reviewing.

Usage

alphagov users

If you are part of the alphagov GitHub organisation you can enable the notifier by raising a PR to add your published documentation to the Rakefile:

pages_urls = [
  "https://gds-way.cloudapps.digital/api/pages.json",
  "https://docs.publishing.service.gov.uk/api/pages.json",
  "your-docs-site.cloudapps.digital"
]

If you want to limit the number of links that are posted to Slack after a single run, add this to limits in the Rakefile

limits = {
  "your-docs-site.cloudapps.digital" => 3
}

The default behaviour is no limit, and the Slack message will contain all pages discovered.

General configuration

The following environment variables are necessary:

• SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL: The Slack webhook URL to allow messages to be posted.
• REALLY_POST_TO_SLACK: Messages will only be posted to Slack if the value of this var is 1.

Slack message customisation

This is the default Slack message when pages expire:

You can customise parts of the Slack message by configuring environment variables. The environment variables you can customise are:

Environment variable name	Purpose	Default value
OVERRIDE_SLACK_MESSAGE_PREFIX	Sets a custom message prefix.	"Hello 🐾, this is your friendly manual spaniel."
OVERRIDE_SLACK_CHANNEL	Sets a single Slack channel to which all messages will be sent.	The owning Slack channel for each page reported in the site's /api/pages.json endpoint
OVERRIDE_SLACK_USERNAME	Sets the username to which Slack messages are attributed.	"Daniel the Manual Spaniel"
OVERRIDE_SLACK_ICON_EMOJI	Sets the icon emoji attributed to Slack messages.	":daniel-the-manual-spaniel:"

This is an example of a customised Slack message:

Licence

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.