I have been making a slack app for the users on my workspace. It is a sidebar that adds slack messaging functionality to our website, so that we don't have to leave the site to see our slack messages. I am having trouble trying to get bearer tokens for each user.
What I have been doing so far is following the Slack OAuth 2.0 Authentication flow in order to receive tokens for users. This worked for me in testing and it works for some of our users currently. However, some users see something completely different.
Instead of asking them for permission to use their slack profile, the slack.com/oauth/authorize is telling them they can't install the app because it isn't listed in the slack directory. However, this page should not be installing the app to the workspace. It is already installed. It should just be asking for their permission to use their profile.
Am I using the wrong page? Did I miss something I need to do?
The Oauth process in Slack is not only used to get an access token, but also always is regarded as installation process for the respective Slack app. So your users are basically (re-) installing your Slack app each time they run through the Slack Oauth process. This is the standard behavior and can not be changed.
If you want to continue using this process you can simple enable installation for your Slack app on the workspace for all users (click on approve on the app management page of your workspace for this particular app) and then your users will no longer get the error message. You may also need to enable distribution of your Slack app on the app management page.
Btw. installing the same Slack app by multiple users is the default approach for getting access tokens for individual users. Slack calls those additional installations "configurations" and you can see them listed on the app ages for your workspace.
Note that Slack access tokens obtained from the Oauth process do not expire. So you only have to let the user install your Slack app once and then store the Slack access token for the next time.
Related
I'm building a Slack app and when I install the app in my workspace, during the Oauth flow it asks me what channel I want messages sent to. I then have to choose among all my channels in a select menu (one of which is my slack app) where to receive messages.
When I install something like the Jira Cloud Slack app, it does not ask me what channel I want to use to receive messages, it just installs the app and I receive messages in the Jira Cloud channel. I'd like to try to set up my slack app so the user does not have to select a channel, but instead the messages go automatically to the app channel (like Jira).
Does anyone know what settings (Oauth scopes maybe?) I need to make this happen?
Are you using Slack's incoming webhooks? Webhooks will require you to specify a channel, but using Sign in with Slack for auth (or just authenticating with their OAuth v2) does not. Also make sure that you're using Slack's most recent version of apps that include granular scopes -- not sure if the legacy apps work like this.
I'm trying to create a bot that people can install in their workspaces and send/receive messages of some sort. The problem I'm running into is the documentation tells you to use the token generated for your workspace:
https://api.slack.com/bot-users#installing-bot
But this makes no sense, seeing as people would be installing the App/Bot on their workspace themselves, it's not like they would be giving me their token or anything. Surely I'm missing something. How am I meant to authenticate a bot against whatever workspace it is installed in a purely API driven way?
There is no "workspace agnostic" Slack token. Every token is linked to a specific workspace and user.
The usual approach is that you provide an installation routine with Oauth 2.0 for your Slack app. When someone installs your app with that routine a new token is created internally that your app needs to collect and store. This is how every Slack app works.
Note that the installation has to be done once only for each workspace. The token does not expire.
Its simply when you install your Slack app on your own workspace only. That can be done directly from the Slack app management window and requires no installation routine. But then you obviously need to manually copy the generated token to your app.
I’m working on a Slack app that a user can install to a workspace using Slack’s Oauth flow. After installing and configuring the app, I’m using Oauth to allow the user to log in and make changes to the app configuration.
The flow for a new user uses the "Add to Slack" button which asks the user to agree to allow bot and identity.* scopes after which my app retrieves and stores bot and user tokens.
Now I'd like to allow the same user to sign in using the "Sign in with Slack" Oauth flow. Per the Slack documentation, the "Sign in with Slack" flow allows just this using the same /oauth/authorize endpoint, but requests only one of the identity.* scopes (I'm using identity.basic):
Sign in with Slack
The user has already authorized my app for bot and identity.* scopes on the initial app install, but surprisingly he/she is re-prompted to confirm allowing my app identity.* scopes on each "Log in with Slack" action.
The slack documentation implies that subsequent login attempts will result in an automatic redirect:
After a user clicks your Sign in with Slack button, their web browser should arrive on Slack's servers.
Your application will wait patiently while the user handles some business or Slack just sends them on their way back to your redirect URL.
(emphasis mine)
However, Slack always requests that the user (re-)authorize my app for identity.* scopes. How can I log users in using Slack with a one-click flow?
Update: Response from Slack
I reached out to the Slack team and got this response:
Unfortunately it looks like we'll need to update the documentation as for the moment what's described there is not accurate. Particularly:
Returning users won’t be distracted by unnecessary approvals, we’ll send them back to your site, service, or app as fast as we can!
Due to a change we made to our authentication flow where we now allow users to select what workspace they're authing with, we present them with the "scopes" or "permissions" page again.
This is definitely something we should consider make better but for the time being it's the expected behaviour and we're going to revise the documentation to eflect that.
Sorry for the bad news.
As of 11/17/19 the Sign in with Slack documentation has not been updated.
For your requirement to implement a web page that is linked to your Slack app with authenticated Slack user you have two alternatives:
Sign-in with Slack
One approach would be to use Sign-in with Slack to authenticate users for your web page. This allows you to clearly authenticate users. However, the drawback is that users would have to repeat the login process every time they open this web page again. This can be somewhat mitigated by using cookies to keep users logged in between browser restarts until they manually log out of the web app.
Note that this auth process is independent from the user logging into his Slack workspace.
Own authentication
Alternatively you can let users directly open your web app from Slack, e.g. by clicking a link button you provide. This URL needs to include information that would allow your web app to get the users current context, e.g. his Slack and User ID.
Note that this URL can be obtainable and potentially misused by a user, so you would need to add measure to protect it e.g. by encrypting the IDs or by adding a secure hash or a one time token ...
let's say I've created slack app and I have client id and secret.
What is the easiest way to get SLACK_APP_TOKEN in my hands that will be able to create channel?
If you want a proper access token that is related to your Slack App the only way to get it is to install your Slack app with the OAuth process as described here in the Slack documentation. You will need a mini website with a script (e.g. PHP) to perform the installation.
The so called test token will also allow you use the Slack API (e.g. to create a channel), provided that the user that created the test token has that right on your Slack. It is the easiest to obtain, but it will always be linked to a user account, not a Slack app. And you can not request specific scopes for it. So for most applications its better to use a Slack App and get a proper access token by installing it.
If you are looking for an example for an installer script, here is a complete script in PHP. It will run on any webserver that supports PHP. Its very basic, but it will work just fine.
I have a private slack application (developed by user 'X' from team 'XT')
I have a web server knows how to complete the Oauth process and generate tokens per teams
Now- as a user Y from team YT I am installing the slack app on my YT team and get a token,
using that token I perform API call for channels.create ,
I got into my team (aka YT) and indeed I see that the channel was created ,
BUT
it's written that the channel was created by the specific user that installed the slack app, meaning user Y.
I would expect to see that channel was created by the application not by specific user.
Is there any way to do that ?
thought about using bot token (got from the app instllation) but channels.create cannot be performed by a bot
I am afraid there is no solution for your problem. Every "write" action on Slack has to be attached to either a bot or a user. And since channels.create can not be used by a bot, it has to be a user.
The master access token of your Slack app is linked to the user that installed it, which is why that user will appear as creator of the channel when you use it.
I use a generic admin user ("slackadmin") for that purpose on my own Slack, but that will of course not work as general solution for each Slack team that want to install your app from the Slack App Directory.