How to get GitHub notifications in Slack

Updated August 2026 · 5 min read

Slack is where your team already lives, so it's a natural place for GitHub activity to land. There are four realistic ways to set it up — each with different trade-offs in noise, setup effort, and who it works for. Here they are, from most common to most niche.

Method 1: The official GitHub + Slack integration

GitHub maintains an official Slack app. Install it from the Slack App Directory (search "GitHub"), then in any channel run:

You'll be asked to connect both your GitHub and Slack accounts. After that, the repo pushes PRs, issues, commits and releases into the channel.

The catch: by default it's loud. A busy repo floods the channel, so most teams immediately trim it down:

This is the right choice if you want team-level visibility: everyone sees that a PR needs review. It is not personal — you can't tune it per-person without creating separate channels per developer.

Method 2: Slack's native GitHub notifications (DMs)

In newer workspaces, Slack has a built-in GitHub notifications feature: open Slack → Apps → GitHub → configure which events should arrive as direct messages. This keeps team channels clean and gives each person their own feed.

The catch: configuration is coarse. You subscribe per-repo, and filtering down to "only things that mention me" or "only my PRs" is limited. Many people end up muting it because the signal-to-noise isn't there.

Method 3: Webhooks into a Slack incoming webhook

For full control, point a GitHub repository webhook at a Slack incoming webhook URL (usually via a tiny relay like AWS Lambda or Cloudflare Worker that reshapes GitHub's JSON payload into Slack's Block Kit format).

The catch: this is a weekend project. You own the code, the error handling, and what happens when either API changes payload formats. Worth it only if neither of the two methods above fits.

Method 4: Skip Slack — see them natively on your Mac instead

Here's the honest question behind "GitHub notifications in Slack": what you actually want is not to miss the PR that needs you. Slack just happens to be the window you already have open.

If you're on macOS, there's a more direct route: a menu bar app that shows your unread GitHub notification count next to the clock, all day. You glance, you click, you're in the pull request — no channel noise, no webhook plumbing, and crucially no risk of your one important review drowning between 200 deploys and meme posts.

This also covers what Slack integrations structurally can't: notifications that are about you specifically — review requests, @mentions, CI failures on your branches — filtered out of everything else automatically, because it reads your notifications endpoint with your token. Everything stays local on your machine.

Which should you pick?

• Team awareness ("someone please review this")? Method 1 — the official integration.
• A private feed, roughly tuned? Method 2 — native DMs.
• Custom routing and you enjoy building it? Method 3 — webhooks.
• Personal signal without the noise? Method 4 — a menu bar app. It answers the actual need directly.