Prox

Share anonymous confessions in Slack.

Deploy

Setup

Prox comprises of three components:

The web server for receiving and responding to event payloads from Slack
A MongoDB database for saving the current post number, submitted posts, user pseudonyms, etc.
The Slack app itself

Environment variables

Here are all the variables you need to set up on the server, with hints.

# Port to run the server on
PORT=3000

DATABASE_URL=mongodb://…

# App config. Obtained from the "Basic Information" page of your app.
SLACK_BOT_TOKEN=xoxb-…
SLACK_SIGNING_SECRET=…

# Slack channels where the app should post to. The review and stream channels are highly recommended to be private channels.
SLACK_POST_CHANNEL_ID=CXXXXXXXX
SLACK_REVIEW_CHANNEL_ID=GXXXXXXXX
SLACK_STREAM_CHANNEL_ID=GXXXXXXXX

Starting the server

This section is only relevent to you if you’ve decided to run Prox on a platform other than Heroku.

git clone https://github.com/ifvictr/prox
cd prox

# Install dependencies
yarn

# Start Prox in production! This will build the source files and then run them.
yarn start
# Or, if you need to run it in development mode instead.
yarn dev

Creating the Slack app

For Prox to work, you’ll need to register a Slack app with the appropriate OAuth permissions, event subscriptions, and commands.

Interactivity & Shortcuts

For the Request URL under the Interactivity section, enter http://<YOUR DOMAIN HERE>/slack/events. This will be used for the app’s buttons.

To create a shortcut for sending anonymous replies, click Create New Shortcut under the Shortcuts section. The shortcut should appear On messages. Fill out the Name (e.g. Send anonymous reply) and Description (e.g. Reply to a post anonymously) fields. Enter reply_send in the Callback ID field.

Slash Commands

The following commands are needed. Enter the same request URL you used in the previous section.

/prox: Learn how to use Prox

OAuth & Permissions

Install the Slack app to your Slack workspace first.

The following bot token scopes are required:

channels:history: Used for the 'Send anonymous reply' shortcut.
channels:read: Used for logging movement events.
chat:write: Used for sending messages.
chat:write.customize: Used for sending anonymous replies with pseudonyms and icons that distinguish different repliers.
commands: Used for /prox.
groups:read: Used for logging movement events.
im:history: Used for receiving submissions via DMs from users.
im:write: Used for starting DM channels with users, which can then be used to send anonymous reaction prompts when needed.
reactions:write: Used for adding anonymous reactions.

Event Subscriptions

Subscribe to the following bot events:

app_home_opened
member_joined_channel
member_left_channel
message.im

The request URL is also the same here.

After you’ve followed all the above steps, you should see something like this in the console:

Starting Prox…
Listening on port 3000

License

MIT License

ifvictr / prox