Emoji Papertrail

A slackbot that was built to notify a channel whenever a new emoji is created. Like this:

Limitations

Currently this bot isn't able to tell you which user created the emoji. Unfortunately Slack seems to think being able to make an API call and see who uploaded an Emoji is an enterprise only feature. The pieces are in place to support that if someone wants to send a PR to add support for both the regular workspace emoji.list as well as the Enterprise Tier-only admin.list.emoji call.

Deployment

Bot itself

The bot is a normal FastAPI python application. It is intended to be run in Google App Engine, but can be run by anything capable of running a Python ASGI application.

On App engine, this mostly:

1. Clone the repository
2. Create an app.env_variables.yaml and populate the two Slack App Credentials as defined in the config and app.yaml.
3. Run gcloud app deploy

From there you can grab the application's URL and set it as your Slack App URL.

Slack Connection

Slack supports "App Manifests" to make it easier to manage configuration of Slack Apps; here is an example one you can modify to suit your needs:

display_information:
  name: Emoji Papertrail
  description: Friendly bot that monitors for new Emoji in our Slack
  background_color: "#323335"
  long_description: "Scribe responsible for monitoring for new Emoji in our slack.
    It gets notifications whenever a new emoji is created and shares the good
    news with #emoji-papertrail for all the rest of us to see."
features:
  bot_user:
    display_name: Emoji Papertrail
    always_online: false
oauth_config:
  scopes:
    user:
      - users:read
    bot:
      - emoji:read
      - chat:write
settings:
  event_subscriptions:
    request_url: <your bot's HTTPS server endpoint>
    bot_events:
      - emoji_changed
  org_deploy_enabled: false
  socket_mode_enabled: false
  token_rotation_enabled: false

Configuration

Configuration is provided to the bot via environment variables.

Required:

You must pass in the credentials used by this bot to interact with slack:

• SLACK_BOT_TOKEN
• SLACK_SIGNING_SECRET

Optional

You can modify the behavior of the bot in the following ways:

HTTP Server

Environment Variable	Description	Default Value
HOST	Host the Webhook listener will bind to. This are unnamespaced to meet App Engine's default behavior.	127.0.0.1
PORT	Port the Webhook listener will bind to. This are unnamespaced to meet App Engine's default behavior.	8080

Slack Bot

These will all be prefixed with EMOJI_PAPERTRAIL_SLACK_APP.

Environment Variable	Description	Default Value
EMOJI_PAPERTRAIL_SLACK_APP__CHANNEL	Which channel should the bot post its updates to	#emoji-papertrail
EMOJI_PAPERTRAIL_SLACK_APP__SHOULD_REPORT_ALIAS_CHANGES	Should we post about alias updates.	true