How to Get GitHub Notifications in Slack (3 Ways)

If your team lives in Slack, you should not have to keep flipping back to the GitHub notifications tab to find out a pull request needs a review or a build went red. Good news: there are three solid ways to get GitHub notifications into Slack, from a one-click official integration all the way to fully personal PR alerts.

Below I will walk through all three, when each one makes sense, and how to dodge the classic mistake of turning Slack into just another inbox nobody looks at. Already sold on high-signal, per-developer alerts? Jump straight to GitHub PR notifications in Slack.

Method 1: the native GitHub Slack app

GitHub ships an official Slack app, and it is the quickest way to connect the two. If you just want a channel to light up when things happen in a repo, this is where most teams start.

• Install the GitHub app from the Slack App Directory and run /github signin to authenticate.
• In any channel, subscribe to a repository with /github subscribe owner/repo.
• Trim the noise a bit with flags, for example /github subscribe owner/repo pulls,reviews.

It is great if you want a quick GitHub Slack integration and you are fine with activity showing up in shared channels.

The catch is that it gets spammy fast. By default you get all the activity, including the events that do not matter to anyone, and it all lands in one channel mixed together. A review request looks the same as a bot comment, and everyone still has to scan the feed to figure out what is actually theirs. That scanning is exactly what turns into Slack notification noise.

It is also fiddly to keep tidy. There is no global setup, so you have to run /github subscribe and tune the flags in every single repo you care about, one at a time. Miss one and you silently stop hearing about it.

Method 2: GitHub Actions and webhooks

Maybe you do not want a firehose. You just want Slack to ping you when something specific happens, like a CI run going red. In that case you can wire it up yourself with a Slack incoming webhook and a step in your GitHub Actions workflow. You get full control over the message and exactly when it fires.

• Create a Slack incoming webhook for the channel you want to post to.
• Store the URL as a GitHub Actions secret (please do not hardcode it in the workflow file).
• Add a step that posts to Slack, gated with if: failure() so you only hear about the runs that matter.

We wrote a full walkthrough with a copy-paste workflow over here: send Slack notifications from GitHub Actions (CI failures only).

This is the right call for custom, event-specific alerts like deploys or CI failures. The downside is that it is all manual. You end up repeating the setup for every repo and workflow, juggling secrets in each one, and it only covers the events you script by hand, so pull request reviews and comments are still on you.

Method 3: personal PR alerts with GitNotifier

The first two methods either dump everything into a shared channel or leave you writing one-off scripts. GitNotifier flips that around. Instead of a channel firehose, it sends each developer the events they actually need to act on as a personal Slack DM.

• Review requests go straight to the reviewer.
• Failed checks and deploy issues reach the author fast.
• You can react to comments and reply right from Slack, without opening GitHub.
• The stuff that does not need you stays out of the way.

There is nothing to configure per repo. You connect one GitHub App and one Slack App, and the whole team starts getting Slack pull request notifications across every repository, with no YAML or webhook wiring to babysit. It is how teams reduce PR review time with Slack alerts.

If you want per-developer PR notifications that people actually read instead of tuning out, this is the one. See how the GitHub Slack integration for code reviews works in practice.

Which method should you use?

Honestly, it depends on what you are after. Here is the quick version:

If you want to go deeper before you commit to one, we compared the options side by side in our rundown of the best GitHub Slack apps for PR notifications.