semrelay

Semaphore CI notification relay

This is a service to provide Linux desktop notifications for your Semaphore CI builds. Unlike Semaphore's Slack notification feature, this allows filtering to see notifications for only your own builds. It also provides DBus notifications with the Semaphore icon and a default action of opening the build results in your browser.

It's written in Go and consists of a relay server to accept webhook notifications from Semaphore and pass them on via WebSockets, as well as a client that connects to the relay, subscribes to webhook messages, and sends DBus notifications.

It uses the Gorilla WebSocket library, and part of the server implementation is shamelessly borrowed from its example code. DBus notifications use @esiqveland's notify library.

Server

The server provides an HTTPS service to both accept Semaphore webhook notifications to the /hook endpoint and accept client WebSocket connections at the /ws endpoint. It uses CertMagic to automatically acquire a TLS certificate from Let's Encrypt. Clients and Semaphore authenticate with shared secrets; create a password for clients to use and a token for Semaphore to use. You'll also need to set up a domain name for your server.

This has very low resource requirements; a t3.nano EC2 instance works fine and costs $3/month, and can easily be configured with a domain name via Route 53.

It's configured via environment variables:

• DOMAIN: DNS domain name to acquire a certificate for.
• EMAIL: email address used for Let's Encrypt.
• PASSWORD: Password used by clients.
• TOKEN: Security token configured in Semaphore URL.
• VERBOSE: Enable verbose logging.
• TEST: Set to send sample messages to the specified user every 15 seconds for testing.

Running via Docker Compose

The easiest way to run the relay service is via Docker Compose, using the provided docker-compose.yml and the cswheeler/semrelay:latest Docker image built from Dockerfile.server. Copy docker-compose.yml to your server in an appropriate directory (you don't need any other files) and create a .env file in the same directory to set the above environment variables:

DOMAIN=semrelay.example.com
[email protected]
PASSWORD=somepassword
TOKEN=sometoken

Now run docker-compose pull semrelay && docker-compose up -d semrelay. It should acquire TLS certificates and begin listening on ports 80 and 443. It's configured to be restarted by Docker whenever it exits.

The Docker container stores its certificates in a persistent volume to avoid repeatedly generating certificates, which could run afoul of the Let's Encrypt rate limits.

Running directly

Build the server binary with CGO_ENABLED=0 go build ./cmd/semrelay and copy it to the server.

To enable it to bind to ports 80 and 443 without running as root, grant it the cap_net_bind_service capability with sudo setcap cap_net_bind_service=+ep semrelay.

Semaphore configuration

Using the token you configured the server with, set up notifications for the desired project like so:

sem create notification myproject-relay \
    --projects myproject \
    --webhook-endpoint 'https://semrelay.example.com/hook?token=<token>'

Client

The semnotify client can be installed with:

go install github.com/csw/semrelay/cmd/semnotify@latest

It reads its configuration from $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/semnotify/config (typically $HOME/.config/semnotify/config) and from the command line as well. Settings:

• user: GitHub username to receive notifications for.
• password: server password.
• server: server hostname.
• insecure: skip TLS certificate verification (for testing only)
• promotions: whether to show notifications for promotions or only build pipelines.
• ttl: time until notifications expire, e.g. 30s. 0 (never expire) by default.

To use it with sway or i3, you can add exec_always semnotify to your configuration.

Development

This is built with Go 1.17.

There is a simple integration test suite, runnable with ./run_integration.