StackOverflow to Slack GitHub Action

This GitHub Action fetches new StackOverflow questions tagged with open-telemetry and posts them to a Slack channel. It runs on an hourly schedule.

Setup

1. Clone this repository or create a new repository with the provided action.py script and .github/workflows/get-questions.yml workflow file.

2. Create a Slack incoming webhook URL for the Slack channel where you want to post new questions.

3. Add the webhook URL as a secret in your GitHub repository. Go to the "Settings" tab of your GitHub repository, then click "Secrets" in the left sidebar. Click "New repository secret" and add a secret with the name SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL and the webhook URL value.

4. Update the paths in the .github/workflows/get-questions.yml file to match the locations of your action.py file.

5. Push your changes to the repository. The GitHub Action will start running on an hourly schedule.

How it works

The GitHub Action runs the action.py script, which fetches new StackOverflow questions tagged with open-telemetry and posts them to a Slack channel.

In order to not repeat questions, the script stores the timestamp of the last seen question in a file called state.txt. This file is cached by the GitHub Actions runner and restored at the start of each run.

Since GitHub Actions does not allow you to update a cache key, the action relies on the restore-keys behavior in actions/cache. This behavior checks for all keys that match a prefix, then restores the most recent one. Each run of the action produces a new item (state-<run id>) in the cache, even if the timestamp doesn't change.

In order to ensure that cache eviction occurs on our schedule, clean-cache.yaml exists. Daily, it deletes all keys except for the most recent one.

Contributing / Possible Improvements

This should be pretty much done, but there's always improvements that could be made. A fun project might be to generate metrics about the questions being asked and publish them somewhere. Tags could be turned into links. There's a lot of stuff that you get back in the search results that we aren't using. This page shows you the response object, we're only using a few of the fields. It might be nice to get the actual username, see how many answers exist already, etc.

I believe we could also use the Slack API better; there's a lot you can do with it. See this page for more on that topic.