Standup pivots

This is an app for managing Pivotal standup hosts. The main assumption is that the hosts are rotating on a weekly basis.

This app can be used as an example of how to run a Django app on Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

Deploying for the first time

1. The app is configured to use a postgres database by default. When using a different database, change the requirements.txt to include the necessary drivers. Aside from that, binding the database service instance to the app should work out of the box.

2. It is necessary to set the APP_SECRET_KEY environment variable to a random hex string.

3. When deploying the app for the first time, the database migrations should be applied. See https://banck.net/2014/12/deploying-a-django-application-to-cloud-foundry/ for an example of running a database migration on Cloud Foundry, followed by creating an admin user for the admin UI.

4. Once the app is up and running, go to the admin UI located at <your-app-url>/admin, and use the credentials from the previous step. First, fill in the pivots. The most tricky bit is the slack handle a.k.a Slack member ID. It can either be located by viewing the person's profile in slack and clicking a button with a V-shaped down arrow, or retrieved via the users.lookupByEmail or users.list Slack API methods.

5. (Optional) If you want to manually set the standup schedules, fill them as well in the admin UI. Otherwise, they will be automatically set when accessing the public endpoints.

Public endpoints

The app has two public endpoints:

• / displays a human-readable schedule with the standup pair for the current and the next week.
• /slack_notification/ provides a short message that can be posted using an incoming web-hook integration for Slack, e.g. a concourse resource (see below).

Notifying the hosts

It's easy to make slack notifications a few days ahead of the week with a concourse pipeline. For an example, take a look at notification-pipeline.yml. In order to use the pipeline, you will need a slack incoming webhook integration for the channel, and a URL to the root of the deployed application. With these, you can set a concourse pipeline:

$ fly -t wings set-pipeline -p standup-notification -c notification-pipeline.yml \
  -v slack-notification-url=https://hooks.slack.com/services/FOO/BAR/baz \
  -v standup-app-url=https://my-standup.cf-app.com

By default, the pipeline triggers once every Thursday afternoon, but that can be easily changed by editing the notification-pipeline.yml.