jeremyschulman / demo-slack-kentik

Demo Slack application for Kentik Image Cache integration

Demo Kentik Image Cache with Slack

As a User of Kentik and Slack I would like to include data visualizations from the Kentik Portal into my Slack application.

Kentik has created an open-source app, Kentik Image Cache, that is used to execute Kentik TopN chart queries to the Kentik API and locally store the images. Application that want to display images by URL refernce, Slack for example, can then access these images from the Kentik Image Cache REST API.

You can find a short demo video on YouTube here.

Setup

Running the Kentik Image Cache Container

You will need to build the Kentik Image Cache docker container image, as described in that project README file. When you build the image set the tag name to kentik-fotomat. Alternatively you can change the image name in the docker-compose.yaml file. The compose file defines a few environment variables that you need to export, or you can change this file directly:

• KT_AUTH_EMAIL - Your Kentik portal login email address
• KT_AUTH_TOKEN - Your Kentik portal token value
• KENTIK_FOTOMAT_PORT - The HTTP port number you want to expose for the container

You can then use docker-compose or docker compose to start the Kentik Image Cache service.

Running the Demo Slack Application

The fotomat directory contains a demo Slack application that will interact with the Kentik Image Cache app. You will need to define a Slack App in the Slack Platform portal. Configure your app to use Socket Mode. For Slack app setup help, refer to this documentation.

If you want to use the provided start.sh and kill.sh scripts, you will need to export the environment variable SLACK_APP_PORT value for running the demo app on your laptop.

You MUST make a few changes to the code directly to suit your needs. I could make the demo app a bit more configurable; perhaps in time, but for now you need to make the following code changes.

1. You need to change the FOTOMAT_URL value in the command_fotomat.py file. This value must be the value that is reachable via the Slack Platform; meaning it must be publically reachable. The current value is https://fotomat.ngrok.io as I am using ngrok for dev-testing forwarding. You CANNOT use the same value.

2. The demo commands in the command_format.py are bound to specific Kentik data explorer queries; specific to your Kentik portal. You cannot use these. But you can see how the demo app is using them. You will need to substitute your own.