slackbridge

Slackbridge bridges Slack.com #channels between companies.

• Does your company use Slack?
• Does your customer/subcontractor also use slack?

Then, no more hard times of having to grant each others' workers access on both Slack teams: you can now form a union between two of your Slack #channels using this bridge.

Configuration and setup

You'll need to run this as a daemon on a publicly reachable IP:

• Test it in the foreground from the command line, to get a poor mans builtin http server. You can use the nginx proxy_pass directive (without path) to reach it.
• Run it as a WSGI application. Has been tested with uWSGI; you can use the nginx uwsgi_pass directive to reach it. Multiple workers are allowed, as long as it is single-threaded.

Configuration in Slack:

• Create at least one Incoming WebHook per Slack team; record the URL. (Pro tip: set the other relation's brand logo as default icon!)
• Create one Outgoing WebHook per Slack #channel you want to join; record the secret token. Set the webhook POST URL to the URL where this bridge is reachable from the world, and append /outgoing to the path.

Configuration of this application:

• Set the BASE_PATH to "/". If this script does not run in the root of your HTTP server, you need to alter that.

• There is a CONFIG dictionary below. You need to configure it as follows:

  CONFIG = {
      '<outgoing_token_from_team_1>': {
          # The next two settings are for the TEAM2-side.
          'iwh_url': '<incoming_webhook_url_from_team_2>',
          'iwh_update': {'channel': '#<destination_channel_on_team_2>',
                         '_atchannel': '<team2_name_for_team1>'},
          # Linked with other, optional.
          'owh_linked': '<outgoing_token_from_team_2>',
          # Web Api token, optional, see https://api.slack.com/web.
          'wa_token': '<token_from_team1_user>',
      },
      '<outgoing_token_from_team_2>': {
          # The next two settings are for the TEAM1-side.
          'iwh_url': '<incoming_url_from_team_1>',
          'iwh_update': {'channel': '#<destination_channel_on_team_1>',
                         '_atchannel': '<team1_name_for_team2>'},
          # Linked with other, optional.
          'owh_linked': '<outgoing_token_from_team_1>',
          # Web Api token, optional, see https://api.slack.com/web.
          'wa_token': '<token_from_team2_user>',
      },
  }
  

• You can configure more pairs of bridges (or even one-way bridges) as needed. You can reuse the Incoming WebHook URL if you want to bridge more channels between the same teams.

It works like this:

• The Slack Outgoing WebHook -- from both teams -- posts messages to the slackbridge.
• The bridge posts the message to a subprocess, so the main process can return immediately.
• The subprocess translates the values from the Outgoing WebHook to values for the Incoming WebHook, optionally overwriting the #channel name.
• The subprocess translates the values from the Outgoing WebHook to values for the Incoming WebHook:
  • It overwrites the #channel name (if channel in iwh_update is set).
  • It adds avatars to the user messages (if wa_token is set).
  • It replaces @team1 with @channel (if _atchannel in iwh_update is set).
  • It removes/untranslates local @mentions (if wa_token is set).
• The translated values get posted to the Incoming WebHook URL.

Supported commands by the bot -- type it in a bridged channel and get the response there:

• !info lists the users on both sides of the bridge. Now you know who you can @mention.

TODO

• Add license.
• Clean up code (ugly globals). Too few subclasses.
• Make more extensible. You may want to integrate your own slackbot-style responses here.
• Add default icon to CONFIG, so we can reuse the same incoming webhook for more than one team, even if they don't supply the wa_token.
• Clean up the config. It's a horrible mess as it is.