A DevOps team cannot work without specialized tools to cover daily tasks. And there always needs to be a tool for communication and a tool for task management in place. Assuming the use of Slack for communication and Trello for task management, how can we interface both tools without a lot of programming (and making it a development-only party)? The answer is YellowAnt. In this blog, we will set up this ChatOps 2.0 triangle and start working with it.
ChatOps 2.0 illustrated
In this example, you will need access to YellowAnt, Slack and Trello. This can be done by adding a YellowAnt bot user to Slack and integrating it with Trello.
Figure 1: YellowAnt integrated with Slack, as seen in Slack
Figure 2: Trello integrated with YellowAnt and Slack
Figure 3: YellowAnt integrated with Slack as seen in YellowAnt
Now, let’s start a YellowAnt workflow by adding a card to a list on your Trello board.
To keep things simple, I already created a Trello board called “TEST” with a label called “label” and a list called “Slack.”
Figure 4: The Trello board TEST with list Slack
Go to Slack and open your YellowAnt app.
You will see a lot of messages from YellowAnt regarding the installation of the YellowAnt app and Trello integration.
Figure 5: The Welcome page for the YellowAnt app in Slack
Figure 6: Trello integrated with Slack as seen in Slack by YellowAnt
Let’s see what we can do now in Slack.
Enter ‘help trello’ in the Slack command line.
A thread frame will appear with basic Trello commands.
Note the run and explain command buttons. These buttons are part of ChatOps 2.0 — bots interaction through buttons, which makes this tooling more appealing to non-coders.
Figure 7: Thread list for Slack commands in Slack
Go in the thread list to the “Add a card to a list (add-card)” area and click the “Run this command” button as shown in Figure 7.
A pop-up appears as seen in Figure 8.
Figure 8: Add a card to a list (Trello) in Slack
Now we’re ready to add the card to the list.
Enter a board_name, label, list_name and a name.
The board_name is TEST, the label is label, the list_name is Slack, and the name is Sweetcode.
Click the Execute button.
Verify in the threads list if the card has been added to the Slack list as seen in the Trello app.
Figure 9: “Card added” notification in threads list (Slack)
Verify in Trello if the card is really added.
Figure 10: Sweetcode card with label added to Trello list Slack
This experiment shows how Slack can be integrated by YellowAnt with Trello to enable the addition of a card in Trello.
Wrap-up
The workplace assistant bot YellowAnt can be used intuitively (without coding) to integrate the communication tool Slack and task management tool Trello, allowing you to communicate tasks in a Slack group chat between Slack team members.
