Sending notification cards within release pipelines in Azure Devops to Microsoft Teams via a webhook

Here, I will demonstrate how to send nice notifications to Microsoft Teams, from a release pipeline in Azure Devops, notifying that a web application has been deployed, with build/commit, deployment environment details.

I highly recommend to create a task group to contain these set of tasks, and apply variables as needed.

Azure Classic Pipelines…. the same could be done for yaml pipelines.

Create an incoming webhook in teams

For this, we have to go to a specific channel in Microsoft Teams, and add a connector, look for incoming webhook.

Teams will provide a full webhook URL, copy this URL for later steps.

Create JSON File Card

Let’s create a json file within the pipeline. There is a good marketplace task “File Creator” that will allow just this…. you paste in the content, specify a filename path, and done.

lets create a notifymessage.json file, and paste the following content

{
    "@type": "MessageCard",
    "@context": "http://schema.org/extensions",
    "themeColor": "0076D7",
    "summary": "Release Pipeline Notification",
    "sections": [
        {
            "activityTitle": "$(Release.DefinitionName) ($(Release.version))",
            "activitySubtitle": "deployed to $(Release.Environmentname)",
            "activityImage": "https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTy5ihdbdBvYPJ6cEoJFkF6ED9I7LnoaP22yg&usqp=CAU",
            "facts": [
                {
                    "name": "Build",
                    "value": "$(Build.DefinitionName) - $(Build.BuildNumber)"
                },
                {
                    "name": "Release",
                    "value": "$(Release.ReleaseName)"
                },
                {
                    "name": "Branch",
                    "value": "$(Build.SourceBranchName)"
                },
                {
                    "name": "Commit",
                    "value": "$(Build.SourceVersion)"
                },
                {
                    "name": "Requested For:",
                    "value": "$(Release.RequestedFor)"
                },
                {
                    "name": "Date & Time:",
                    "value": "$(Release.Deployment.Starttime)"
                }
            ],
            "markdown": true
        }
    ],
    "potentialAction": [
        {
            "@type": "OpenUri",
            "name": "View Release",
            "targets": [
                {
                    "os": "default",
                    "uri": "$(Release.ReleaseWebUrl)"
                }
            ]
        },
        {
            "@type": "OpenUri",
            "name": "View Published URL",
            "targets": [
                {
                    "os": "default",
                    "uri": "$(Release.PublishedUrl)"
                }
            ]
        }
    ]
}

Next up, Send to the webhook

Now, all we need to do is POST the notifymessage.json file to the Microsoft Teams webhook, and done.

Add a command line task, and enter the following:

curl -vX POST $(Release.TeamsWebHook) -d @notifymessage.json --header "Content-Type: application/json"

Variables

As a result of these tasks created, there will be 2 NEW variables defined:

• Release.TeamsWebHook - will contain the webhook provided by Microsoft Teams connector for a channel
• Release.PublishedUrl - will contain the deployed url for the website application