Retro Pulse

This is a companion project for a blog post about building Slack Apps with Rails 7.

This Slack app, built with Rails 7, is designed to streamline the agile retrospective process with Slack slash commands. While traditional retrospectives are often scheduled at the end of a sprint, shape up cycle, or project, Retro Pulse recognizes the need for a more fluid feedback mechanism. With Retro Pulse, team members can easily submit feedback as it arises during project development, ensuring that valuable insights are captured and not lost in the shuffle.

NOTE: This project is primarily for educational purposes, to learn how to integrate the Slack API with Rails including slash commands and handling modal forms. To use in production would also require user auth, possibly with devise, which is not covered in this release.

Setup

Make sure you're on Ruby version as specified in .ruby-version.

Make sure you have Docker installed for your OS (this project runs Postgres in a Docker container).

Create a free account with Ngrok

Create a new Slack App at Your Apps. For now, choose "From Scratch" name: retro-pulse and select your workspace. We'll be uploading a manifest with the full definition later.

Install dependencies:

bin/setup

Development

Start ngrok and make a note of the forwarding url it generates.

ngrok http 3000

Example: https://abcd-123-123-123-123.ngrok-free.app

NOTE: On the ngrok free plan, it will generate a different forwarding url each time you start it.

Populate env vars:

cp .env.template .env
# fill in SERVER_HOST from ngrok, eg: abcd-123-123-123-123.ngrok-free.app
# fill in other values from your Slack app

Start database:

docker-compose up

Replant seeds:

bin/rails db:seed:replant

WATCH OUT: This also wipes out teams table used by slack-ruby-bot-server-events to keep track of what Slack teams have OAuthed the Slack application. But you can always OAuth again by clicking "Add to Slack" from the index page.

Run the TailwindCSS build and a local Rails server:

bin/dev

Update URLs in your Slack app settings based on the forwarding address assigned by ngrok:

bundle exec rake manifest:generate

Copy the generated app_manifest.json and paste it in the App Manifest section of the Slack App you created earlier. If you see a message about Event Subscription url being unverified, "click here" to have Slack verify it. This should work given that the Rails server is running and ngrok is forwarding to it.

Navigate to: http://localhost:3000

Click Add to Slack and follow the OAuth flow. (you must be logged into your Slack workspace for this to work).

This should add the Retro Pulse app to your Slack workspace.

Then in any channel, type in /retro-open and then /retro-feedback to use the app.

Run tests

bin/rspec

# view coverage report
open coverage/index.html

Debugging

If want to place debugger in Ruby code, need to start server with bin/rails s instead of bin/dev.

Dev Utils

Close all retros:

Retrospective.find_each(&:closed!)

Destroy all retros:

Retrospective.find_each(&:destroy)

danielabar/retro-pulse