Your channel becomes a status board, not an event log. Anyone can see where every PR stands at a glance, without scrolling through five notifications to work out whether something still needs eyes.
Why teams run it¶
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Quiet
State changes become message updates and emoji reactions, not new posts. Dependabot bumps collapse to a single compact line. A busy repository produces one Slack line per PR — total.
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Nothing slips through
A morning digest resurfaces open PRs that nobody touched yesterday. The "Start review" button shows who is already reviewing. See What you see in Slack for the full tour.
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Easy to own
One Go binary, one declarative
config.yaml, one SQLite file. The whole configuration is validated against Slack and your git host before boot. Two secrets, no GitHub App, no OAuth.
The problem it solves¶
The usual way to connect pull requests to Slack is the official GitHub app: /github subscribe owner/repo plus pulls, reviews, and comments. It works, but every event becomes another Slack item. The events are all there; the current state is nowhere.
Notifycat inverts that. Your git host sends PR webhooks, Notifycat routes each repository to the right channel, and one PR keeps one message. Reviews and comments land on it as reactions; merge strikes it through.
Git Provider Support¶
| Feature | GitHub | Bitbucket |
|---|---|---|
| Webhook signature verification (HMAC-SHA256) | Yes | Yes |
| Per-path / monorepo routing | Yes (needs GITHUB_TOKEN) |
Yes (needs BITBUCKET_TOKEN) |
| Stuck-PR digest | Yes | Yes |
| Reactions & review flow | Yes | Yes |
| Token auth | Fine-grained PAT (Bearer) | Access token (Bearer) or scoped Atlassian API token (Basic) |
Where next¶
- What you see in Slack — the message lifecycle, reactions, digest, and Start review button
- Install with Docker Compose — running in ~10 minutes
- Configuration basics — the whole model in two minutes
- Route repositories to channels — mappings, mentions, reactions
- Troubleshooting — fix a delivery that didn't reach Slack
- config.yaml reference — every key