Workflow
Daily GitHub Slack Digest
Automatically gather recent pull requests, open issues, and commits from GitHub, summarize them with AI, and deliver a concise morning digest to your Slack channel.
Tags
GitHub AutomationSlack IntegrationEngineering TeamDaily Digest
The Daily GitHub Digest workflow automatically compiles a brief morning update of key GitHub activities for the vercel/next.js repository. It gathers recent pull requests, issues, and commits, then summarizes them into a concise message sent directly to a Slack channel.
It accomplishes this in the following steps:
- Triggers every weekday morning at 08:00 UTC.
- Retrieves the most recent open pull requests for the repository, sorted by creation date.
- Fetches open issues updated in the last 24 hours.
- Lists recent commits from the
canarybranch. - Merges all this data into a single collection.
- Uses an AI model to generate a short, well-formatted digest summarizing the activities.
- Sends the digest message to a specified Slack channel.
What you need
- A GitHub account authorized to access the target repository data.
- A GitHub API connector set up in Needle with required permissions.
- A Slack workspace and a Slack API connector with permission to post messages to the target channel.
- A Needle platform account to build and run the workflow.
How the flow works
| Step | Component | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Scheduled Trigger | Fires automatically every weekday at 8 AM UTC to start the workflow. |
| 2 | List Open Pull Requests | Queries GitHub for up to 20 open pull requests sorted by newest created date. |
| 3 | List Recently Updated Issues | Fetches up to 20 open issues that were updated in the last 24 hours. |
| 4 | List Recent Commits | Gets up to 20 recent commits from the canary branch. |
| 5 | Merge Data | Combines pull requests, issues, and commits data into one payload for summarization. |
| 6 | AI Summarization | Uses an AI model via Needle to produce a short digest. It formats the summary in Slack markdown with bold section titles and lists just titles and authors. It limits entries to 5 per section and keeps total length under 2000 characters. |
| 7 | Text Sanitization | Removes problematic characters like backticks from the AI output to ensure Slack displays the message correctly. |
| 8 | Send Slack Message | Delivers the polished message to the configured Slack channel without additional formatting blocks, preserving the simple text layout. |
Output
You get a neat morning Slack message titled Daily GitHub Digest showing:
- Pull requests ready for review.
- Open issues updated recently.
- Recent commits on the specified branch.
The summary is concise, easy to scan, and ends with a brief takeaway line.
Notes
- The workflow currently targets the
vercel/next.jsrepository but can easily be customized for your own repositories. - It respects rate limits by fetching only up to 20 items per category.
- The AI prompt is carefully crafted to keep the summary brief and Slack friendly.
- Make sure your Slack connector permissions allow posting to your target channel.
- Timezone is fixed to UTC but can be adjusted as needed in the schedule trigger.
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