Mattermost v1.1: Now connects to IRC, as well as your in-house applications
Mattermost v1.1, an open source, self-hosted Slack-alternative, now connects to your in-house applications in real time.
Mattermost v1.1 connects to your in-house applications in real time
We’re excited to announce new integrations support in Mattermost v1.1, and share examples from the community, such as the Matterbridge project connecting Mattermost to IRC, as well as fully-functional application templates created by the core team you can use to connect your in-house applications to Mattermost.
Integrations
Hundreds of applications connecting to Slack can soon connect to Mattermost, and do more than they ever could before.
Notifications in Mattermost v1.1 can come from a broad array of applications. Discourse, GitLab and GitHub examples shown above.
Repeated community requests for real-time integration with GitLab, Discourse, GitHub, Jenkins, Twitter, Dropbox, Google Drive, and other leading applications led to us building incoming webhooks and open source integrations services for Mattermost v1.1.
Post real-time messages into Mattermost v1.1 using the same webhook call used to post messages into Slack.
Following our “Slack compatible, but not Slack-limited” principle, Mattermost v1.1 offers incoming webhook APIs compatible with Slack’s proprietary implementation while also supporting the flexible and powerful markdown standard popular among open source projects.
Notifications from GitLab on merge requests renders GitLab Flavored Markdown directly in Mattermost markdown
This means developers who’ve built integrations for Slack can adapt them to Mattermost with minimal changes–and they can also send richer, more useful messages.
Example: Suppose a user files an issue in GitLab (the leading open source GitHub-alternative) using markdown to include references to in-line images, issues, merge requests and commits. The new issue can now trigger a real time notification sent to Mattermost where the contents of the ticket render in full markdown.
Notification from new GitLab Issue posted to Mattermost can include headings and in-line images defined in GitLab markdown, which render in Mattermost markdown.
In contrast, when Slack receives the same notification from GitLab, images are dropped due to incompatibility with Slack’s proprietary formatting.
IRC
Support for Internet Relay Chat has been a common request across the community. Literally days after we had outgoing webhooks on master, a community project offered implemented IRC support.
Matterbridge by 42wim is an open source IRC bridge for Mattermost and it’s been adopted by the Mattermost core team. Today, you can now join #matterbridge on irc.freenode.net to join a room connected to an IRC channel in the core team’s Mattermost site (of course, you can also talk to the core team directly on Mattermost as well on the nightly builds server).
Matterbridge connects Mattermost channels to IRC. Talk to the Mattermost core team using IRC at #matterbridge on irc.freenode.net
Outgoing webhooks to support Matterbridge will be available in Mattermost v1.2 which ships November 16th (Mattermost now ships on the 16th each month). While Matterbridge won’t work with Mattermost v1.1, we wanted to include it since it’s part of the growing community of Mattermost integrations.
Application Templates for In-House Applications
Teams using Mattermost on-premise often need to connect to in-house applications to Mattermost channels. To make it easy to integrate those systems, we created open-source application templates that show how to move data in and out of Mattermost, and how to transform and render it using webhooks.
GitLab Integration Service for Mattermost
The first template to ship with Mattermost v1.1 is the GitLab Integration Service for Mattermost, which brings in, transforms, and renders data from GitLab issue, comments, and merge request events in Mattermost channels in real time.
The open source GitLab integration service for Mattermost provides a template for connecting output from on-premise applications to incoming webhooks of Mattermost
In its default setup, the service monitors GitLab repos and replace dozens of daily notification emails with neatly organized channel messages, concisely conveying vital project info.
Learn more about Slack-compatible incoming webhooks in the Mattermost documentation.
Giphy Integration Service for Mattermost
The second template shows a preview of interactivity across Mattermost channels and external applications via outgoing webhooks, which ship in Mattermost v1.2 on November 16.
The Giphy Integration Service for Mattermost listens for triggers in Mattermost channels (looking for the phrase “gif: KEYWORD” to be entered), then sends a request to an external application for processing (the Giphy online service takes in KEYWORD and returns the URL to an animated gif in its database matching the keyword), and Mattermost renders the returning payload in the channel where the event was triggers.
Sample application sending command and keyword from Mattermost channel to external application and returning animated GIF file from database based on keyword.
This is a fun example which can be adapted to have Mattermost users in business settings bring back customer profiles with an email address ( “customer: [email protected]“), or sales data with a company name ( “sales: Demo Co.” )
These application templates show how your organization can use webhooks to connect Mattermost to your vital applications, making it easier than every to simplify your communications.
Community Applications
Ready more about open source integrations and applications from the Mattermost community, including Jenkins and early work on native applications for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows.
Learn more about Slack-compatible outgoing webhooks (available now on master and in Mattermost v1.2 shipping November 16) in the Mattermost documentation.
We’re delighted to share these new features with you and look forward to your questions, comments, and ideas. Please join us on our forum to discuss.
