Connecting Slack to Your Workspace

In order to connect slack with your openwork workspace, you will need the following:

  1. Valid slack admin permissions to add an app
  2. Create a simple slack app
  3. Connect said slack app with your workspace

This is one of the most relevant and meaningful applications of Openwork, and we use it daily ourselves.

Disclaimer: We recommend setting the slackbot with a remote workspace instead of in your local machine to ensure there’s hardware isolation between the remote workspace the ai can access and your local machine.

For team-owned Slack or other long-running connectors, you can host the runtime in an OpenWork Cloud shared workspace instead of keeping it on a laptop or self-managed server.

Having the right slack permissions

You should either be a slack owner, admin or have the right level of approval to be able to add an app into slack.

Creating a slack app

Go to Create new app in Slack. What you need to obtain are the xoxb (bot) and xapp (Websocket) tokens to paste into Openwork. For more guidelines, questions and instructions regarding slack, please follow own slack’s own documentation.

  1. Create the App Manifest: Go to api.slack.com/apps → Create New App → From a manifest → pick your workspace.
  2. Install to Workspace & Grab Tokens After creating the app:
    • Install App — sidebar → Install App → Install to Workspace → authorize.
    • Copy the Bot token (xoxb-...) — shown right on the “Install App” page after authorization.
  3. Generate an App-Level Token (for Socket Mode)
    • Sidebar → Basic Information → scroll to App-Level Tokens.
    • Click Generate Token and Scopes → add scope connections:write → name it anything → Generate.
    • This gives you the xapp- token that we use to open the websocket connection.

Note: We’re sharing a template manifest at the end of this tutorial for you to use directly.

Connecting the slackbot with the workspace

Now, once you have both of these tokens, you can directly paste them into the app.

Paste your xorb- and xapp- tokens into Settings > messaging.

Send test message

Test the bot by sending a message. It should respond instantly indicating that a new session has been initiated and then send the actual response afterwards. For now, you will have to use @slack-bot-name every time you want to talk to it.

Template Manifest Example

Feel free to use this as a template (or modify it accordingly according to your own use-case)

display_information:
  name: MyBot
  description: Your description
  background_color: "#000000"
features:
  bot_user:
    display_name: your-display-name
    always_online: false
oauth_config:
  scopes:
    bot:
      - assistant:write
      - app_mentions:read
      - channels:read
      - channels:history
      - chat:write
      - files:read
      - files:write
      - im:history
      - links:read
      - links:write
      - lists:read
      - lists:write
  pkce_enabled: false
settings:
  event_subscriptions:
    bot_events:
      - app_mention
      - message.im
  interactivity:
    is_enabled: true
  org_deploy_enabled: false
  socket_mode_enabled: true
  token_rotation_enabled: false