GOLANG SLACKBOT TUTORIAL

Build Your Slack App Home in Golang Using Socket Mode

Building a home for your app — revisited in Go

Photo by Olia Nayda on Unsplash, Gopher by Egon Elbre.

This tutorial is about implementing an App Home in Golang with the slack-go library and Slack’s Socket Mode. This guide was inspired by an article from Slack’s documentation.

An App Home is that space that appears under the App section in the conversation list with your app’s name. It is a fully customizable space to provide documentation and interaction with your app.

Photo by the author.

“Why Socket Mode?” you may ask.

With Socket Mode, you don’t need a server with a publicly available IP address. In other words, your laptop, your Raspberry Pi, or a private server can host your bot. Socket Mode is perfect for small applications that you do not intend to distribute via the App Directory.

Configure Your Application

To start this tutorial, you will need a Slack application with the proper permissions and Socket Mode activated. You can refer to this documentation to create your app and add the permissions. I also wrote a dedicated article to facilitate the setup steps:

Build Slack Applications in Golang using Socket Mode — Setting Up

Do not forget to activate Socket Mode in the appropriate section.

Step 1: Create the Project Repository

First, create a new Go project and import slack-go:

go mod init 
go get -u github.com/slack-go/slack

In this tutorial, I’m using my fork of slack-go because the main feature I am using to handle events has not yet been merged (#PR904).