Slack Presence

This is a script meant to automatically manage your presence in Slack using Slack's API. The purpose of this script is to automatically manage changing your presence in Slack to "offline" during non-working hours. This allows you to read messages without showing you "online" where you may feel obligated to respond to a message that realistically can be left until morning. This also manages returning your presence to "online" during working hours so that coworkers know that you are online and available.

Set-up

Set-up a virtual environment and activate it:

python3 -m venv env
source env/bin/activate

You should see (env) before your command prompt now. (You can type deactivate to exit the virtual environment any time.)

Install the requirements:

pip install -U pip
pip install -r requirements.txt

Obtain a Slack API key here.

Configure the key in the "Permissions" option
Under "Scopes -> User Token Scopes" include users:write
Install your app to the desired workspace
Copy the "OAuth Access Token" in the "Permissions option (it should start with "xoxp-")

Set the global variables START_TIME and QUITTING_TIME in slack_presence.py.

Set up your environment variables:

touch .env
echo SLACK_API_TOKEN="XXX" >> .env

Usage

Make sure you are in the virtual environment (you should see (env) before your command prompt). If not source /env/bin/activate to enter it.

Make sure .env variables are set:

set -a; source .env; set +a

Then run the script:

Usage: slack_presence.py

Deployment

For provisioning a new server see deploy_tools/provisioning_notes.md.

Set the host of your new server as an environment variable:

export HOST="YOU@HOST.COM"

You can deploy automatically to your new server using the following command:

fab deploy:host=$HOST

Testing Suite

This repository contains a test suite consisting of functional tests and unit tests.

Functional Tests

These test the program from the outside, from a user's point of view and are also known as Acceptance Tests or End-to-End Tests. You can run them with the following command:

python3 -m unittest discover functional_tests

Note: These tests require that the Slack API Token also have the scope `users:read`

Unit Tests

These test the program from the inside, from the developer's point of view. You can run them with the following command:

python3 -m unittest discover tests

A comment on TDD

This project was done following Test-Driven Development principles where the starting point is a failing test. My process was to write a unit test to define how I wanted the code to behave. That is the point where I wrote the "actual" code to get the unit tests to pass.

While this may seem unnecessary for a program of such a small size and may seem like overdoing, TDD principles help to create quality, maintainable code and as such I believe are good habits to foster even on a small project such as this.

License

Slack Presence is licensed under the MIT license.

danrneal/slack-presence