Slack

In the last few years, many new chat and collaboration platforms have appeared. One of the most used ones is Slack. Slack is a cloud-based team collaboration tool, and this allows even easier integration with Ansible than XMPP.

Let's put the following lines in the uptime_and_slack.yaml file:

---
- hosts: localhost 
  connection: local
  tasks: 
    - name: Read the machine uptime 
      command: 'uptime -p' 
      register: uptime 
    - name: Send the uptime to slack channel 
      slack: 
        token: TOKEN 
        channel: '#ansible' 
        msg: 'Local system uptime is {{ uptime.stdout }}.' 

As we discussed, this module has an even simpler syntax than the XMPP one. In fact, it only needs to know the token (which you can generate on the Slack website), the channel to send the message to, and the message itself.

Since version 1.8 of Ansible...