Happy New Year folks – Hope you all had a lovely time over the holiday period!!
So…I’ve been a bit quiet lately on the All-Things-Postman front, It’s bugging me a little bit…I already have a list of different features that I need to create examples for but as I’m also a daily user of Postman, I see all the newer stuff that comes with each update – I keep falling further behind.
My goal was to keep it up to date but I’m falling short…I’m not going to beat myself up about all that though – Mainly because I’ve been busy creating other useful things for all the lovely Postman / Newman users 🙂
Before Christmas, NewVoiceMedia held their quarterly Hackathon – I love them, it’s a chance for anyone in the business to create something awesome and then present their efforts back to the rest of the NVM people. I’m a hacker of code so I tend to try to create ‘something’, some of these things are totally rubbish but some, in my own opinion, make me a little bit proud. 🙂
I started my Hackathon project with a bit of a head start, I was already working on a Hipchat integration that would allow anyone to run a set of ‘Smoke Checks’ against our API endpoints, in any of the environments where these endpoints are deployed. All anyone needed to do was type a custom slash command ‘/smokecheck‘ and then add a couple of arguments to tell the app what environment to run on and how many test run iterations you required.
This was fine and it worked, I also had this linked up to an AWS S3 bucket which stored a custom HTML Report for each test run but I wasn’t 100% happy with it, it was easy enough to get something working using Hipchat’s API but it’s quite limited in terms of what you can display in the message.
I didn’t have enough freedom or space to add the summary details in the format I wanted. Hipchat is on its way out and thankfully, we are moving to Slack! It’s been a long time coming at NVM!!
I now have a new API to play with and I decided that I was going to re-create my ‘SmokeChecker’ within Slack. I have to say, it was a bloody pleasure creating an integration in Slack, so many features and things that you can do. They have also put a lot of effort into the documentation side, which helps new users like myself, get up to speed quickly.
Ok, so I created something for NVM users but that’s never enough for me, I wanted to also share this bot with a wider group of people – I’ve created a ‘basic’ version of the Slack bot for anyone to use in their context.
The only thing that is really different is that it’s not linked to an AWS S3 bucket, that was actually hard, for me, to make it generic but it does still create a custom HTML report. 🙂
I’m not going to go in to detail about the different things that it will display in the messages and the installation process – I created a GitHub repo with all of those details on the README.md file. It’s all there and ready for anyone to use:
https://github.com/DannyDainton/basic-newman-slack-bot
If that wasn’t enough…..I went and created a new custom HTML reporter, I started out using the one created by Postman but this is lacking a few important things and I couldn’t wait for them to be added. They actively encourage Postman users to create their own Newman reporters so I did just that….and published an NPM package! 🙂
https://www.npmjs.com/package/newman-reporter-htmlextra
Again, this has all the details contained in the README.md file so I’m not going to bore you all and repeat that information again. The GitHub repo for the reporter is linked to the NPM package so you can have a look through the code too.
There has been 400+ downloads of the package so far which makes me feel flipping amazing!!
That’s it…I’m going to go and crack on with updating the All-Things-Postman repo now, I’m sure that will keep me busy for a while. 🙂
Danny Dainton 