SlackSDK

This package provides a fairly complete implemenation of the Slack Web API.

using SlackSDK
SlackSDK.WebClient(token)
client.chat_postMessage("C033xxxxxx"; text="Hello from your bot")
    Dict{String, Any} with 4 entries:
      "channel" => "C033xxxxxx"
      "ok"      => true
      "message" => Dict{String, Any}("bot_profile"=>Dict{String, Any}("name"=>"APITesting", "team_id"=>"T0LLxxxxx", "id"=>"B033Vxxxxxx", "deleted"=>false, "app_id"=>"A033xxxxxx", "icons"=>Dict{String, Any}("image_36"=>"https://…
      "ts"      => "1645461486.214089"

Access to the Slack api is provided via the WebClient struct. Construct it by passing a token directly. Alternatively, set the token as an environment variable called SLACK_API_TOKEN and then use the no-arg constructor. You will most likely want to use a bot token here.

The list of api methods are documented by slack at https://api.slack.com/methods. It will be helpful to familiarise yourself with the structure of the api before using this package.

The Slack api methods are generally of the form group[.subgroup].methodname. Replace the dots with underscores, and use that name to call the member function on the WebClient object you created above. For example, the chat.postMessage(...) API method is called using client.chat_postMessage, while the admin.analytics.getFile method is called using client.admin_analytics_getFile(...). Required arguments should be passed as positional arguments to this function, and optional arguments are passed as keyword arguments.

There are some discrepancies between the online documentation and the api specs about which arguments are required. In case of doubt, please refer to spec file stored in this repo, or view the docs. Search the method name to find its details. Required parameters will be explicitly marked as such.

The list of available methods can be seen via tab completion of properties of the client object

julia> client.admin_apps<tab><tab>
admin_apps_approve         admin_apps_approved_list    admin_apps_requests_list    admin_apps_restrict         admin_apps_restricted_list

https://docs.juliahub.com/SlackSDK/1AgC7

The files in the web/ subdirectory of this package were generated from the Slack API Specs. The commit bc08db49625630e3585bf2f1322128ea04f2a7f3 was used, which last had substantive changes in October 2020. The code generation used the Swagger.jl@v0.3.5 julia package, invoked via /home/me/.julia/packages/Swagger/LiWeJ/plugin/generate.sh -i specs/slack_web_openapi_v2_without_examples.json -o src/web -c specs/config.json.

The token parameter is present in all methods in this schema, but is not meant to be a query parameter. It is meant to be injected into the headers as a Bearer token, and is unclear how the spec expects this to work. Swagger.jl currently does not have automatic support for this mechanism.

The following regex was therefore used to remove all token parameters from the API calls. /\{\n.*\n.*\n\s*"name": "token",\n.*\n(.*\n)?\s*\},?\n\s*// . One manual intervention was required for the /reactions.add method.

The header with the bearer token is then injected by a higher level wrapper within this package.

• Only the Slack Web API is implemented. The Event API is not yet implemented.
• Not all the methods are tested. Please open issues if you find problems calling any method.
• There are no integration tests. Maybe a test workspace could be created exclusively for use by this package, and automated tests run against that? Contributions on these lines are most welcome.
• The interface is somewhat non-julian. It's admittedly more pythonic. However, in this case, it seemed to be simplest and most convinient implementation. It allows us to hide a lot of the complexity of calling the API in a generic fashion.

There are a few other packages in the Julia ecosystem that interacts with the Slack API: Slack, Slacker and SlackThreads Most of them seem limited to a small set of functionality, implementing only a couple of API methods. This package on the other hand is mostly auto-generated from the Slack API specs, and thus covers almost the entirety of the Slack API surface.

Various trademarks held by their respective owners. This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by Slack Technologies or Salesforce.