Shrijan Choudhary » I will try to maintain the brevity of the article without missing on any crucial step and I guarantee that if you follow the steps, you will have a working slack bot for yourself.

Creating a slack app

• To create the app go to Your Apps and click on Create New App.
• Basic information : Scroll down to reach the Display Information filling the name, description, a photo and a background colour for your bot.

Authorization and Permission for your BOT

add the permissions for your bot so that it can read and write text messages with anyone who wants to interact with your bot.

• Head over to OAuth & Permissions and scroll down to Scopes. To add the permissions

  • chat:write
  • im:read
  • im:write
  • im:history
  • mpim:history
  • app_mentions:read
  • channels:history
  • groups:history
  • reactions:write

• Scroll up and click Install App option to install the app on slack with these permissions.

Setting up the RASA credentials.yml

• Copy the Bot User OAuth Token and paste in the credentials.yml page of your RASA project

• Head over to Basic Information to gather the Signing Secret.

• Keep the slack_channel parameter empty.

Running scripts for actions, ngrok and shell.

1. Running the action script

   Un-comment the action_endpoint tag in the endpoints.yml

   

    $ rasa run actions
   

2. Start your RASA shell

   Make sure you are on the RASA project directory and the virtual environment of project

   $ rasa run --port 5002 \
   --connector slack \
   --credentials credentials.yml \
   --endpoints endpoints.yml \
   --log-file out.log \
   --cors * \
   --enable-api \
   --debug 
   

3. Start ngrok on the 5002 port

    $ ngrok http 5002
   

   

4. Copy the URL and append webhooks/slack/webhook to get something like below:

    https://b90b-202-44-192-214.ngrok.io/webhooks/slack/webhook
   

Final configurations on Slack

1. Go to the Event Subscription section and then toggle the Enable Events switch on the page to ensure it is ON.

2. Paste the above copied ngrok URL to Request URL

3. Waiting for a “Verified” remarks against your request URL section.

   

4. Go to Subscribe to bot events and add the following events

   • message.channels
   • message.groups
   • message.im
   • message.mpim

   

5. Save the changes and reinstall the app.

To start chatting with your bot, go to https://slack.com/intl/en-in/ and click Launch Slack to go to your workspace. Select your bot from the left hand side menu and start chatting! :)

Reference

• Integrating your RASA chat bot with Slack

• RASA Connecting a bot to Slack