This past month I did setup KGB to send notifications to #debian-lts when new merge requests were created in the LTS website’s repo and I learned a couple cool things. I’ve been trying to document things more so I don’t have to research the same topic months later, hence the blog seemed like a good idea, specially since many debianites have KGB set on their favorite IRC channel and this post will go to planet.debian.org.
Selecting What Goes to IRC
Salsa (Debian’s GitLab instance) can generate a lot of events for things that happen on a repository and a lot of them can be pushed to KGB via webhooks. Generally I prefer a minimal set enabled otherwise it’s too much clutter on the IRC side, but it’s important to go through each option to see what makes sense or not. From the experience I had, the following ones are the most useful to have it on:
- Push events
- Tag push events
- Comments
- Issue events
- Merge request events
- Pipeline events
Reducing the Noise
For Debian packaging, one may find it useful to add a pattern filter so only the packaging branch updates go to IRC. If you are using DEP-14, that’s pretty easy, “debian/*” will do the job.
Notably, “Job events” are left out. Basically it’s just too much info, you get one alert when a job is scheduled, then when it’s started and another one when it’s completed. Well, each pipeline has at least a few of them, multiply by three and you can understand my point.
Besides that, pipelines also generate the same amount of events as jobs, so it
might be a problem too. Well, KGB comes to the rescue. It allows you to filter
pipeline events, because you really only care about the pipeline when it fails
;-) To do just that, pipeline_only_status=failed.
Another interesting option is limiting the commits shown when the push event
has too many of them. One can do that with squash_threshold=3. Remember I
want less clutter?! Three commits is my limit here.
Final Result
The final URL for me looks like this (newlines added for clarity):
http://kgb.debian.net:9418/webhook/?channel=debian-<your_preferred_channel>&
network=oftc&
private=1&
use_color=1&
use_irc_notices=1&
squash_threshold=3&
pipeline_only_status=failed
You can see there are more options than the ones I described earlier, well, now it’s your time to go through KGB’s documentation and learn a thing or two ;-)