At work we have been piloting HipChat’s new self-hosted on-premises option for the last few months.  It has been great having a bunch of people who work in different buildings and on different schedules using shared chat rooms for communication.

I have also been experimenting with hooking HipChat into our toolchain. We now have a chat room where every Capistrano deployment is announced, and another where all of our high-priority Zabbix alerts are collected. HipChat makes this easy with their version 2 API’s room notifications feature. A room owner can simply generate a room-specific API token and plug it into a script to send notifications.

Here is an example:

And to make it easy for the next person who wants to do this, I’ve released the code on GitHub.

Instructions for setting it up are in the README. And 15 minutes later, you’re in business with pretty and useful Zabbix notifications in HipChat.