Slack Invitation app

When you administer a free Slack team, you might know this issue: copying and pasting emails to invite new members is quite cumbersome. It would be so much easier, if they could just fill in their email into a form, hit the submit button and receive an invite from Slack automatically... BINGO! That's exactly what this little Ruby / Sinatra app is doing :-)

Let people invite themselves to your Slack group with this very simple Ruby / Sinatra app

Example running on heroku

https://rubywebdev.herokuapp.com/

(Actually this app is live and used, please do only enter your email address when you really want to join the group of Ruby developers in Barcelona ;-))

Setup

If you want to use this app for your own Slack group, you just have to change the contents of Config.rb to match your information. You can get the Slack API key for your group at https://api.slack.com/

Development

Fork and clone the github repository or just run git clone git@github.com:mediafinger/slack-inviter.git
Check that you have a compatible Ruby version installed. At the moment the .ruby-version file sets it to 2.2.3
run bundle install
no database needed :-)
either ensure that in app.rb the DummyInviter is instantiated - to not send API calls through the real Inviter class
or config your team variables on .env file (copy it from .env.example)
run the server bundle exec ruby app.rb
open the website at http://localhost:4567/

If you make it look nicer, than pretty-please send me a pull request :-)

Testing

Just run rake test to run all the tests.

Deployment

slack-inviter is a simple Ruby app, using a Gemfile which references Sinatra and all other needed gems. No gem has any system dependencies. The app does not need a database. So it should be fairly easy to deploy to any server that is set up for Ruby apps.

I only deployed to heroku. If you want to do so too:

just follow the steps on https://toolbelt.heroku.com/ and afterwards:
run git push heroku master
run heroku config:set SLACK_TEAM_RUBYWEBDEV_API_TOKEN=your-slack-team-api-token (you might want to rename the ENV variable to match you slack team name)
run heroku open

Et voila - you should now have a running app!

One last thing

If you use the app, please star it on GitHub and/or let me know you are doing it. Don't worry, it is for free, no strings attached.