Have Sanity Notify your team on Slack using Webtask.io

Written by Knut Melvær

Lots of people have been chopping up their infrastructures into small single purpose slices known as microservices. Cloud functions, or serverless functions if you like your buzzwords served hot, lets the rest of us easily use the same kind of architecture for everyday tasks.

In this post, we'll make a tiny, tiny service that relays a message to Slack every time someone either creates, updates or deletes a blog post in a Sanity Content Studio. Sanity is a “backend as a service” that allows you to easily structure your content and get a graph-based realtime API instantly. It's pretty neat, and you can read about setting up a simple react-driven blog on it here.

1. Setting up the Webtask function

There are multiple services that offer easy-to-set-up serverless functions out there. The free dyno on Heroku can be used, as well as stdlib and AWS lambda. But today, we're gonna use Webtask.io by Auth0 as our serverless function provider. They all work pretty much the same though. You'll get an URL you can send HTTP-requests to, which runs a function that takes this request and a callback as it’s parameters. It doesn't have a persistent state (unless you connect it to some sort of database or session provider) and is geared towards doing one thing.

If you have the wt command line interface (npm i -g wt-cli), run to deploy this script on your own Webtask-account: