python-slackrealtime

Python library for the Slack Real-Time Messaging API. Requires Twisted and Autobahn.

Currently a work in progress, not all of the protocol is implemented, and the behaviour of this library is not fully documented.

The project aims to provide a light wrapping around Slack's API in order to make objects of some of it's constructs, and provide some convenience functionality (such as converting timestamps to fully-fledged datetime objects). As such, the API will adapt (to a degree) to Slack RTM API changes.

It also includes a very thin wrapper around Slack's REST API (slackrealtime.api), for the purposes of setting up the initial connection.

It is designed primarily to allow writing bots that interact with the Slack API. I have a repository with examples available.

LGPLv3+ license.

There also exists a Python library written by Slack themselves which doesn't use Twisted, python-slackclient.

Installing the dev version

You'll need to install non-Python dependencies:

# apt-get install libffi-dev python-dev build-essential

In order to install the development version from the git repository:

$ pip install 'git+https://github.com/micolous/python-slackrealtime.git#egg=slackrealtime'

This can also be included in a requirements.txt file like this:

git+https://github.com/micolous/python-slackrealtime.git#egg=slackrealtime

Getting an API token

There are three ways to get an API token for this library:

• xoxb: Add a Bots integration to your team, which has some additional restrictions.
• xoxp: Use the Slack Web API page to create a token for your user.
• xoxs: Scrape the Slack Web UI for a variable called boot_data.api_token, which additionally allows you access to the users.admin family of undocumented methods.

This library does not presently support OAuth or other such authentication mechanisms, only static API tokens.