We created a simple solution for getting a overview for planning when people in the team are coming into the office, without the need to introduce any new tools or complex 3rd-party slack applications.
This python script posts a message in multiple slack channels, and responds to the same message with 5 emojies that represent the weekdays.
The application is self-hosted and uses a Slack bot token, cron jobs can be created from CI tools like Github Actions / CircleCI Cron, run as a Kubernetes cron job or just be run locallly with python/docker.
To add a new channel:
- Type
/invite atofficein the channel to grant permissions to the bot. - Create a new PR.
- Enter channel name in
channels.txt, create commit. - Merge PR to main.
You need to create a Slack app yourself at https://api.slack.com/apps/
Create a new Slack app, customize it as you prefer.
The bot requires the following bot token scopes:
chat:writereactions:write
Install the bot to you slack organization after setting permissions, you will get a new slack bot token afterwards.
As a pre-requsite, you'll need to have 5 custom emojies representing each day in your slack organization. Without the emojies defined in the list below, the script will fail.
:monday::tuesday::wednesday::thursday::friday:
Example emojies can be found under the
examples/folder.
To run the script you need two things, a .txt file containing name of the slack channels and a environment variable for the bot token.
If you are using python, then a channels.txt file should exist next to the officeplanner.py script and the SLACK_BOT_TOKEN must be populated in the same shell as the one running python.
The latest docker image is available on github packages, and is updated when a PR is pushed to the main branch.
ghcr.io/entur/officeplanner:main
Mount a .txt file to /app/channels.txt in the docker container.
Populate a SLACK_BOT_TOKEN environment variable with the token you got when creating the slack app.