This project lets you use /map in Slack to find and share the location of meeting rooms, people or anything else.
The app heavily uses different AWS services, namely: Lambda, DynamoDB and S3.
The production app is replicated in a staging environment in order to make it possible to test new changes without disturbing current users. In this readme, everything will be described in terms of production, however staging is identical except the services have the suffix -staging.
There are two lambdas being used: the app lambda takes care of all the slack interactions. The db lambda is used for database entry. They are located at [src/backend/main_app.py] and [src/backend/main_db.py].
The static content is stored in two buckets on S3. The static content bucket is used for hosting the website and the image bucket is used to store and serve the resulting gifs.
This project uses DynamoDB as its database. Two tables are in use: the MapLocations table contains all the location data and the AuthTokens table contains the access tokens which enable the app to send messages on behalf of the user.
The /map callback URL is set in the Slash commands section of the Slack App. This URL is queried whenever a user types /map. When a user presses a button on a message returned by the app the interactive messages URL is being called. This URL is set in the Interactive messages section. Both URLs should point to the main_app.py lambda.
To set up the slack map, one has to create two AWS Lambdas, two S3 buckets and two DynamoDB tables. The credentials/links to them should be stored in src/backend/env.py. In that file, you can find more detailed instructions on how to get the required variables.
Both lambdas should be set up to use Python 2.7. The size of RAM should be modified accordingly, to make sure that the requests made don't timeout. When creating them, choose the option to create an API gateway too. The lambdas should have an environmental variable set, either "PROD" or "TEST", depending on whether it's the production or testing environment. For safety reasons, if none of them is set, the lambda will exit with an error.
The S3 buckets should allow public read to be able to be used with Slack. One of the buckets should enable static website hosting. The "Index document" should be set to "index.html".
Two DynamoDB Tables should be created. The first one, which stores locations, should have a primary key named "entityName" of type String. The second one, which stores athorization tokens, should have a primary key named "user_id" of type String.
The role should have the following AWS permissions:
- lambda execution
- S3 full access
- DynamoDB full access
To deploy the application, fill in the three fields with lambda function names and the static content bucket name in the script [deploy_to_aws.sh] and execute it. The deployment defaults to the staging environment. The deployment script uses the default profile in AWS CLI, so make sure that you configured the credentials to AWS properly. You can do it using this guide.
The first step every user has to complete is to give the app the rights to send messages as the user. This is important since we can not post to direct message channels otherwise. Please refer to the Slack documentation for how the authentication works.
The first request the user sends is processed by main_app.py. It checks if the AuthTokens table contains an access_token for this user's id. If this is not the case a Slack message is returned which contains a link to the slack authentication URL (https://slack.com/oauth/authorize?) with all the necessary parameters. After the user clicks the Authorize button he is redirected to the URL specified in the OAuth & Permissions section of the Slack app. This URL points to the main_db lambda which finishes the OAuth procedure by querying the Slack OAuth access URL (https://slack.com/api/oauth.access). The resulting access_token is persisted in the AuthTokens table.
To return a location, the main_app.py gets the location from the MapLocations table, generates the gif and returns the message in the HTTP response-body. One thing to note is that all the information that is used when the user clicks Send on the resulting message is already encoded in the send button.
When the user clicks Send, main_app.py gets called again and returns the instruction to delete the current message (the one with the send and cancel button). At the same time, the Slack's postMessage URL (https://slack.com/api/chat.postMessage) is queried to post the message publicly. This is done because the message type can not be changed from private to public. So we need to delete the private message and post a public one using the information encoded in the send button. This information especially includes the user's acces_token.
If the location cannot be found in the database, the main_app.py returns a message containing the link to the static website hosted in the static content bucket of S3. This link has some information encoded in it that the db lambda needs for the database entry as well as some information for the frontend. When the user persists a location main_db.py is called and the location is persisted in the MapLocations table.
The information that is encoded in the buttons or the frontend URL is encoded using Python's base64.urlsafe_b64encode method. This prevents the data from being escaped by Slack.
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