Integrating RSS feeds to Slack (including YouTube)
How to add an RSS feed to a Slack channel to automatically post new content from the feed
What this article will cover:
I use RSS feeds in Slack for a combination of things. Mostly for subscribing to status feeds. In this example I am going to show you how to subscribe to the Heroku status feed and further down I will show you how to add an RSS feed so you can get all the posts from a YouTube channel.
Adding a simple RSS feed
Here’s how to add the RSS feed from Heroku to a Slack channel. Go to the Heroku status site and go to the bottom of the page. You will see something that looks like the symbol in the red box in the footer of the site:
Click on the symbol and it will take you to another site, just copy the URL of the site. This is what you will need to subscribe to the feed. Now all you need to do is to go to the channel you want the feed to appear. You could think about making a separate room like #uptime or #statusfeed for example. Now just type /feed followed by the URL you copied. So for Heroku status it would be:
/feed http://feeds.feedburner.com/herokustatus
So check sites for RSS symbols and you should be able to get a notification every time new content is pushed!
Adding a YouTube RSS feed
So how do we get an RSS feed for a YouTube channel? This requires a little more work than the last example. You need to get the ID of the channel. So go to the “home page” of the channel. The example I’m going to use is one which posts lots of Disney videos. So the “home page” URL is https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMddDi4iCT8Rz8L0JL-bH7Q. You want the bit that come after the /channel. This is the channel ID, so you want this: UCMddDi4iCT8Rz8L0JL-bH7Q. Next up you want to add this to a special URL: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id= and then add this feed in the same way as above. So you will put this into your chosen Slack channel:
/feed https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCMddDi4iCT8Rz8L0JL-bH7Q
Now every time one of my favourite channels posts I’ll know!
Listing feeds in a channel
So what if you want to find out a complete list of feeds that you are subscribed to in a Slack channel? Just type /feed list and it will list the feed that you are subscribed to along with the URL and ID.
Removing RSS feeds
What if you want to remove a feed as it is no longer useful? Remember the ID we got before with the /feed list command? Just copy this and type /feed remove <YOUR-ID-NUMBER>, so for the Heroku status feed I subscribed to earlier in this article I would just type /feed remove 379456364963 and that feed would be gone.
Many thanks to this article by Daniel Miessler, it helped me figure out how to add the YouTube RSS feed.
This article is a part of the "Slack" series
- Slack Shortcuts
- Setting Reminders on Slack
- Accessibility Options on Slack
- Making Custom Emojis on Slack
- Setting Your Status on Slack
- Shrugging on Slack
- Formatting on Slack
- Making a Channel on Slack
- Syntax Highlighting on Slack
- Custom Startup Messages on Slack
- Adding an integration to a Slack room
- This Article