I keep most of my personal projects on https://gitlab.com. While I love the ci-cd approach and how this can be defined, I hate that I cannot get an overall view of all the pipleines and their status.

It happens quite often that I trigger deployments on multiple projects and I need to check the status for each. And the only way to do this is by navigating to each individual project and go to CI/CD -> Pipelines.

Telegram Bot to the rescue

As an active Telegram user, simplifying the process with a bot seemed natural. I'm looking for something simple: a conversion with the bot where "it" can message me when a pipeline progesses.

Creating the bot.

You can follow this tutorial to quickly get a bot up and running and get your bot access token. You will need this when calling the needed APIs

With @BotFather you can also tweak other settings of your bot. You might want to change privacy regarding groups and so on, depending on how you plan to use it

Setting up the conversion

For the bot to be able to send messages you will need a chat id.

Open a conversion with your newly created bot and send the /start command.
Next we need to call the getUpdates endpoint of the bot to get the messages send to your bot. This will help us finding the chat id.

Use your prefferred rest client (i'm using Insomnia) and execut a POST Request to

POST https://api.telegram.org/bot$ACCESS_TOKEN/getUpdates

Make sure you replace $ACCESS_TOKEN with your own.

Response should look structuraly similar.

{
  "ok": true,
  "result": [
    {
      "update_id": 785513355,
      "message": {
        "message_id": 19,
        "from": {
          "id": 213456691,
          "is_bot": false,
          "first_name": "**redacted**",
          "last_name": "**redacted**",
          "username": "**redacted**",
          "language_code": "en"
        },
        "chat": {
          "id": 213456691,
          "first_name": "**redacted**",
          "last_name": "Tere",
          "username": "**redacted**",
          "type": "private"
        },
        "date": 1676219181,
        "text": "/start",
        "entities": [
          {
            "offset": 0,
            "length": 6,
            "type": "bot_command"
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  ]
}

Note down the value for message.from.id. This is the chat id were gonna use for sending updates

Sending messages with using the REST API

To send a message to a chat you will need to call the sendMessage endpoint.

POST https://api.telegram.org/bot$ACCESS_TOKEN/sendMessage
{
    "chat_id": "213456691",
    "text": "hey from bot",
    "disable_notification": true
}

Integrating into .gitlab-ci.yml

Now it's up to you on which stages you want to be notified one.

In the stage's script you just need to execut the REST call with whatever text you want.

For this I'm using curl and it looks something like this:

build:
  script:
    - |
      curl --request POST --url https://api.telegram.org/bot$ACCESS_TOKEN/sendMessage --header 'Content-Type: application/json' --data '{"chat_id": "213456691","text": "'"Building  [${CI_PROJECT_NAME}] for environment: [${TARGET}] from branch: [${CI_COMMIT_BRANCH}] 🚀"'","disable_notification": true}'

Make sure you replace the $ACCESS_TOKEN. Also chat_id value. You should even add them to your CI/CD Variables

And that's it. Now you will have better view over your jobs.

That's it ��. Thank you

🙏🏼