How To Manage Team’s Shared Resources in Slack

Free Alternative to Yoink Bot

Photo by Rubaitul Azad on Unsplash

Imagine a scenario in which you need to deploy your app to a testing or staging environment. At the same time you’re a member of a larger team and your colleagues have access to deploying to these environments as well. That means you have to check if someone else is not currently using the environment before you deploy. Now the problem is: How do you check that?

How to lock the shared environment

You could potentially message everyone individually or ask in a Slack channel. However, that opens some questions:

1. Should you wait for everyone in the channel to confirm they are not using the testing/QA or staging environment? Or how long should you wait before it’s okay to take over?
2. What if the person, who is using the environment, is away from keyboard and you can’t get a reply?
3. Won’t your question for confirmation get lost in the Slack channel among other messages?

Alternative — MutexBot

And that’s what can be simplified by MutexBot — a simple Slack bot for managing shared resources. How does it work?

1. You create a Slack channel specifically for managing shared resources and add…