Notification for Manual Stages

[Orlando_Kelly]

We are using Bamboo, and have several manual stages setup. But the user does not know they need to trigger a manual stage, as there does not seem to be any notification mechanism when a stage needs to run. How can we let our users know there is a stage waiting for them to move on.

[Steffen Opel [Utoolity]]

Unfortunately there is no built-in notification for this (IMHO) highly useful event, despite being an obvious candidate to implement approval workflows and similar scenarios. And surprisingly the resp. issue Manual stage reached notification (BAM-14089) hasn't attracted many votes either so far, but regardless I recommend to vote/watch/comment on this issue to raise Atlassian's awareness for this use case.

Potential workarounds

There are a couple of partial workarounds I can think of from the top of my head (all of which lack the UX around recipient selection/management):

1. Obviously you can always simply use a Script task as the last one in the preceding stage and send an email via the shell or trigger an external API that notifies the user via chat for example.
2. If you are comfortable with Groovy scripting, the excellent ScriptRunner for Bamboo app allows you to Run code in response to [internal] Bamboo events, one of which is the desired StoppedOnManualStageEvent, so you can once again send an email or trigger an external API, possibly having better access to the Bamboo users involved in the build to select the appropriate recipient.
3. If your are comfortable with AWS Lambda (which currently supports Node.js/JavaScript, Python, Java 8, C#/.NET Core, and Go), our own Automation with AWS (Bamboo) app features an Automate with AWS task that once again allows you to use pretty much any external notification channel you can think of, for example Amazon SES for email, or the HipChat/Slack/Stride REST APIs for a chat notification.

For workarounds 1 and 3, you can use Bamboo variables to inject contextual information into the custom notification message, possibly crafting links back to the plan and/or specific build that requires approval for example.

Good luck!