for developers

Sending alerts to Slack

This tutorial will guide you through connecting Pathway to Slack and sending alerts to a specific channel.

If you need to send some alerts to Slack based on your Pathway pipeline, you should use a pw.io.slack.send_alerts function. It allows for sending messages from a Pathway table to a specific channel in Slack. This tutorial will guide you on how to use it.

Setting up Slack authentication

To send messages to Slack, Pathway uses the Slack web API. To use it, you need to have a token for authenticating to Slack. You can read how to get it in the Slack documentation. For pw.io.slack.send_alerts, your token needs to have a chat:write scope.

Connecting to Slack with Pathway

If you obtained your Slack token, you are ready to connect your Pathway application to Slack with pw.io.slack.send_alerts.

pw.io.slack.send_alerts takes 3 arguments:

  • alerts, a ColumnReference with the content of the alerts you want to send to Slack.
  • slack_channel_id, a string with the ID of the channel you want to send the alerts to.
  • slack_token, your token for authenticating to Slack.

To create a simple example of sending Slack alerts, you need a Table with a column with the content to be sent to Slack. This tutorial uses a simple table defined with pw.debug.table_from_markdown. In the following example, slack_channel_id and slack_token are obtained from environmental variables, respectively SLACK_CHANNEL_ID and SLACK_TOKEN. Make sure to set them before running the program.

import os
import pathway as pw

slack_channel_id = os.environ["SLACK_CHANNEL_ID"]
slack_token = os.environ["SLACK_TOKEN"]

t = pw.debug.table_from_markdown("""
messages
Hello_Slack
This_is_Slack_alert
""")
pw.io.slack.send_alerts(t.messages, slack_channel_id, slack_token)
pw.run()

When you run it, you will get the alerts in your Slack channel.

Alerts sent to Slack channel

Note, that the values of the column messages in the above example do not have spaces. It is a restriction of pw.debug.table_from_markdown which uses spaces to separate columns. Any regular string works with the other connectors.

If you want to see more examples with pw.io.slack.send_alerts you can check the drive_alert example in the llm-app.