Google Analytics to Slack Notification using GitHub Actions

The steps to create the required Google Project, Slack Webhook and GitHub Action are detailed in the following article on The New Stack: How To Use GitHub Actions and APIs to Surface Important Data

Getting started

1. Clone the repository
2. Rename .env.example to .env
3. Update the following variables
   • SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL
   • GA4_PROPERTY_ID
   • GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS_BASE64
4. Install dependencies (uses npm)
   • npm install

Development

To invoke the function manually from your local development environment you can run the following in your terminal.

node src/index.js

Creating a base64 URL

The Google Application credentials are in .json format. To use them in a .env you can convert them to a base64 string by running the following in your terminal.

cat name-of-creds-file.json | base64

When saving the resulting string in your .env file be sure you wrap it with quotations, e.g. GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS_BASE64="abc123..."

Cron syntax

The GitHub Action in this repo is scheduled to run each Friday at 10am UTC. A schedule uses POSIX cron syntax, e.g.

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 10 * * 5' # Runs every Friday at 10 AM UTC

Manual trigger

The GitHub Action in this repo contains the following which allows you trigger the workflow manually from the GitHub UI.

on:
  ...
    - ...
  workflow_dispatch: # Allows manual triggering