Personal Slack-GitHub DM Notifications For Pull Requests Reviewers: How to set up real-time alerts in GitHub

My development team faced the inconvenience and forced measure of the fact after opening a pull request in GitHub and assigning reviewers, they have to send a message to the Slack channel with the whole team and re-tag the reviewers. And even in this case this message sometimes could have been forgotten/skipped because of a pretty big amount of conversations in the channel.

I started researching how to make notifications come automatically with the mention of pull request reviewers. I read many comments and suggestions in countless GitHub issues, and many forums with hundreds of struggling developers & managers at least for the last 5 years, but there was no perfect or at least OK solution.

Finally, I found this overtly hidden feature recently added to GitHub. Therefore, I will not tell you all the other options that were not bad but didn’t satisfy the whole team and overall company, but only this perfect option, which allows you to send an individual message in PM to each reviewer or user who was mentioned in the comments in real-time mode. On the Internet’s surface, there is really no information about this feature and instructions on how to integrate/activate this function, so I decided to write this tutorial myself.

1. Go to github.com and click on your profile icon in the upper right corner (you must be logged in).

2. Select “Settings” from the appeared list.

3. Under “Scheduled reminders”, click on the button “Add your first reminder”.

4. Under “Slack workspace”, click Authorize Slack workspace and follow the instructions. (Interface could look a bit different in your case, but steps should be identical).

5. Selected your newly connected reminder integration under the “Scheduled reminders” heading.

6. Now you must activate the most important and no less hidden checkbox – “Enable real-time alerts”.

7. Check the boxes of the notifications you want to receive in real-time in your DM.

8. To save and activate all of the above just click “Create reminder”.

At this stage, you should already have in your Slack an app fully, which will send you the notifications configured for your needs in your direct messages.

9. Go to the “Scheduled reminders” page, change configuration and click on the “Update reminder” button.

10. If you want to delete a reminder, then click on the red “Delete this reminder” button at the bottom of the page.