Never miss an update: Azure Verified Modules with GitHub Bot & Teams

Introduction

Never miss an update with Azure Verified Modules again! For a while, this has been my go-to solution for staying in the know about any new AVM updates to Bicep modules. Whether it’s getting notified of a bug fix, a new feature, or a module, this solution will help keep you up to date with the AVM project for Bicep!

Using the GitHub bot for Microsoft Teams, I’ll detail in this post how you can configure it to alert a channel of your choosing for the AVM GitHub repository.

GitHub bot setup

You can directly add the bot via this handy quick-add URL provided by the GitHub team: GitHub + Microsoft Teams

Alternatively, you can also search in the ‘Apps’ area within Microsoft Teams like so:

Next, you’ll need to authenticate to GitHub with your account:

Teams setup

Now that the GitHub bot is present in Teams, you can interact with the bot by tagging it in a channel: @GitHub for further configuration and setup. More configuration information can be found here: GitHub – integrations/microsoft-teams: Bringing your code and work to the conversations you care about with the GitHub and Microsoft integration.

In my instance, I’ve set up a dedicated ‘AVM Alerts’ channel where I want the bot to publish messages. This also allows me to turn on notifications for the channel if I want to get activity notifications via Teams for any new AVM updates.

In my example, I’ve configured the bot to notify only on new merges to the main branch on the Azure/bicep-registry-modules repository.

@GitHub subscribe azure/bicep-registry-modules commits

Then run:

@GitHub unsubscribe azure/bicep-registry-modules issues, pulls, comments, releases, deployments

It appears there is a bug, hence the need for the second command run. When you specify a particular notification type, it still subscribes you to everything. You then have to unsubscribe from everything you don’t want, to be left with your original filter.

Alerts in action

Now, when new commits are made into the main branch you’ll get notifications to the Teams channel:

As you can see, there are now alerts coming through notifying you of new features to existing modules and bug fixes to modules! Nice.

Conclusion

That’s it! Simple but effective notifications to keep you and your team up to date on the Bicep AVM project.

It’s really easy to set up, and the notifications aren’t overbearing with noise, as they are simple to glance at with the tags, ‘fix’, ‘feat’, etc. Although this article was specific to the Bicep Azure Verified Modules repository, it can obviously be done on any GitHub repository, including your own private ones.