Slack wrapper

This is a simple python command line interface that wraps the python slack SDK to be able to send slack messages from the command line.

Requirements

The guide is written for linux based systems. It can be adapted to other operating systems.

Installation

Follow the slack tutorial

Follow the slack guide on Posting messages using curl to set up a bot in your workspace with the right permissions. Remember to give the bot permission to send private messages by setting the Messages Tab in App Home on.

After you're finished setting up the bot you should be able to post a chat message using curl -d "text=Hi I am a bot that can post messages to any public channel." -d "channel=C123456" -H "Authorization: Bearer xoxb-not-a-real-token-this-will-not-work" -X POST https://slack.com/api/chat.postMessage

where you need to change token to the bots token and channel to the channel ID to which you want to send the message. If the message is sent and received successfully we're ready for the next step.

Set up the environment variables

We need a place to store channel IDs and the bots access token. For this we create a .json file and point to it with an environment variable called SLACKDATA. The .json file should look like this

{
	"channelID" : {
		"user1" : "channelIDForUser1"
		"user2" : "channelIDForUser2"
		"channel1" : "channelIDForChannel1"
	},
	"token" : "xoxb-not-a-real-token-this-will-not-work"
}

where token is replaced with the token of the bot and channelID contains pairs of users or channels as keys and userIDs or channelIDs as values. The .json file can have an arbitrary name, but we'll call it .slackdata in this example. Start by adding a couple of users/channels. We can add more later.

Next we add set the environment variable. For a user this can be done in the ~/.bashrc by adding the line export SLACKDATA="/path/to/.slackdata" and sourcing the ~/.bashrc. The environment variable can also be set system wide in /etc/environment.

Install

Install the package with python3 setup.py install

Examples

The send the message Hello, world! to user1 run slackmsg -t user1 -m "Hello, world!