Setup & Installation

• Install ngrok: https://dashboard.ngrok.com/get-started/setup
• Run

ngrok http 3000

This exposes your local flask server using a randomly assigned URL that you get from the command. This will be of the form https://.ngrok.io. Note this URL will change everytime you restart ngrok.

• Create a new Slack App: https://api.slack.com/apps
  • Click "Create New App", choose "From scratch" option
  • Provide an App Name, Select a workspace
  • Add Features & Functionality
    • Slash Commands:
      • Command: /galle
      • Request URL: provide the ngrok URL you got above
      • Short Description: Generates an image from a text prompt using Dall-E
      • Usage Hint: ""
    • OAuth & Permissions
      • The Bot User OAuth Token you see here is the slack token you will use in your code
      • Scopes: Enable the following bot token scopes: chat:write, chat:write_customize, chat:write.public, commands, incoming-webhook
    • Activate Incoming Webhooks
      • The webhook URL you see here is what is provided as the response URL in the code
  • Install your app:
    • Install to Workspace: specify channels that the bot can post to
  • Manage Distribution: To install app in other workspaces

Replicate API

Although you can run the DALL-E mini and similar models locally, they take a significant amount of compute and a GPU to run in a reasonable amount of time. For this implementation, I opted to get the images using the Replicate API. This requires a "Hobby" subscription ($10/month). The API token is provided in the code.

There are several models available via Replicate and the code allows you to switch using the following dict:

model_dict = {"borisdayma": "borisdayma/dalle-mini",
              "kuprel": "kuprel/min-dalle",
              "mehdidc": "mehdidc/feed_forward_vqgan_clip"}

The first two take ~ 25 sec, the third one is significantly faster at ~ 3 sec.

Run flask server

• Create a conda environment:

conda create -n "dalle" python=3.8
pip install flask replicate 

• Run flask server to serve generated images to slack workspace

python dalle_slackbot.py

Run on Google Cloud

• Create a basic f1-micro (~$5/month) instance
• Installation

# Get ngrok & other tools
curl https://bin.equinox.io/c/4VmDzA7iaHb/ngrok-stable-linux-amd64.zip -o ngrok-stable-linux-amd64.zip
sudo apt-get install unzip tmux git
unzip ngrok-stable-linux-amd64.zip

• Run ngrok in a tmux session

tmux
./ngrok authtoken <token>

• Run flask server in a separate tmux session

tmux
git clone https://github.com/sanzgiri/dalle_slackbot.git
pip3 install flask replicate packaging
cd dalle_slackbot
python3 dalle_slackbot.py