Brigade Slack Gateway

This is a work-in-progress Brigade 2 compatible gateway that receives events from Slack slash commands and propagates them into Brigade 2's event bus.

Installation

The installation for this gateway is multi-part, and not particularly easy, at least in part because of a potential "chicken and egg" problem. Setting up this gateway requires values obtained during the creation of a Slack App. Setting up the Slack App may require the gateway's public IP (if you're not using a domain or subdomain name instead). We will use an approach of setting up the Slack App first, with a placeholder value for the gateway's address, if necessary, in which case the Slack App configuration will be revisited after the gateway is configured and deployed.

Prerequisites:

• A Kubernetes cluster:

  • For which you have the admin cluster role
  • That is already running Brigade 2
  • Capable of provisioning a public IP address for a service of type LoadBalancer. (This means you won't have much luck running the gateway locally in the likes of kind or minikube unless you're able and willing to mess with port forwarding settings on your router, which we won't be covering here.)

• kubectl, helm (commands below require Helm 3.7.0+), and brig (the Brigade 2 CLI)

1. Create a Slack App

A Slack App is a special kind of trusted entity that is "installable" into a Slack workspace to enable integrations.

This gateway can support multiple Slack Apps, but these instructions walk you through the steps for setting up just one.

• Visit https://api.slack.com/apps. Log in if you are not logged in already.

• Click Create New App and From scratch.

• Specify an App Name, select the workspace to install your new App into, and click Create App. This will create the App and take you to the App's own page.

• Under the heading Add features and functionality, click Slash Commands, and then Create New Command.

• Set Command to be the word, with a leading slash (/), that should trigger an event. Example: /demo.

• Set the Request URL to https://<your gateway domain or subdomain name>/slash-commands.

  • If you're not using a domain or subdomain name and want to use a public IP here instead, put a placeholder such as http://example.com/slash-commands here for now and revisit this section later after a public IP has been established for your gateway.

• Provide a Short Description of what the command will do and optionally, provide a Usage Hint.

• Click Save

• Return to https://api.slack.com/apps and select the App you just created. This will take you to the App's page.

• Under the App Credentials heading, make note of the App ID and Signing Secret. You will be using these values again in another step.

• Click OAuth & Permissions and make note of the Bot User OAuth Token found under the OAuth Tokens for Your Workspace heading. You will be using this value again in another step.

2. Create a Service Account for the Gateway

Note: To proceed beyond this point, you'll need to be logged into Brigade 2 as the "root" user (not recommended) or (preferably) as a user with the ADMIN role. Further discussion of this is beyond the scope of this documentation. Please refer to Brigade's own documentation.

Using Brigade 2's brig CLI, create a service account for the gateway to use:

$ brig service-account create \
    --id brigade-slack-gateway \
    --description brigade-slack-gateway

Make note of the token returned. This value will be used in another step. It is your only opportunity to access this value, as Brigade does not save it.

Authorize this service account to read all events and to create new ones:

$ brig role grant READER \
    --service-account brigade-slack-gateway

$ brig role grant EVENT_CREATOR \
    --service-account brigade-slack-gateway \
    --source brigade.sh/slack

Note: The --source brigade.sh/slack option specifies that this service account can be used only to create events having a value of brigade.sh/slack in the event's source field. This is a security measure that prevents the gateway from using this token for impersonating other gateways.

3. Install the Slack Gateway

We're using the GitHub Container Registry (which is an OCI registry) to host our Helm chart. Helm 3.7 has support for installing charts directly from OCI registries.

First, be sure you are using Helm 3.7.0 or greater and enable OCI support:

$ export HELM_EXPERIMENTAL_OCI=1

As this chart requires some custom configuration, we'll need to create a chart values file with said config.

Use the following command to extract the full set of configuration options into a file you can modify:

$ helm inspect values oci://ghcr.io/brigadecore/brigade-slack-gateway \
    --version v0.3.1 > ~/brigade-slack-gateway-values.yaml

Edit ~/brigade-slack-gateway-values.yaml, making the following changes:

• brigade.apiAddress: Address of the Brigade API server, beginning with https://

• brigade.apiToken: Service account token from step 2

• github.apps: Specify the details of your Slack App(s), including:

  • appID: This is the unique ID for a Slack App. You took note of this value in a previous step.

  • appSigningSecret: This secret can be used to validate signatures on inbound slash commands. This is the Signing Secret you took note of in a previous step.

  • apiToken: This token can be used to authenticate when sending messages back to Slack. This is the Bot User OAuth Token you took note of in a previous step.

• receiver.host: Set this to the host name where you'd like the gateway to be accessible.

• receiver.service.type: If you plan to enable ingress (advanced), you can leave this as its default -- ClusterIP. If you do not plan to enable ingress, you probably will want to change this value to LoadBalancer.

Save your changes to ~/brigade-slack-gateway-values.yaml and use the following command to install the gateway using the above customizations:

$ helm install brigade-slack-gateway \
    oci://ghcr.io/brigadecore/brigade-slack-gateway \
    --version v0.3.1 \
    --create-namespace \
    --namespace brigade-slack-gateway \
    --values ~/brigade-slack-gateway-values.yaml \
    --wait \
    --timeout 300s

4. (RECOMMENDED) Create a DNS Entry

If you overrode defaults and set receiver.service.type to LoadBalancer, use this command to find the gateway's public IP address:

$ kubectl get svc brigade-slack-gateway-receiver \
    --namespace brigade-slack-gateway \
    --output jsonpath='{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].ip}'

If you overrode defaults and enabled support for an ingress controller, you probably know what you're doing well enough to track down the correct IP without our help. 😉

With this public IP in hand, edit your name servers and add an A record pointing your domain to the public IP.

Note: If you do not want to use a domain or subdomain name, or are unable to, and elected to use a placeholder URL when initially setting up your Slack App, return to https://api.slack.com/apps and edit your App's configuration to send your slash command to https://<public ip>/slash-commands.

5. Add a Brigade Project

You can create any number of Brigade projects (or modify an existing one) to listen for events that were sent from Slack to your gateway and, in turn, emitted into Brigade's event bus. You can subscribe to all event types emitted by the gateway, or just specific ones.

In the example project definition below, we subscribe to all events emitted by the gateway, provided they've originated from the fictitious Slack app with the ID FAKEAPPID (see the appID qualifier).

apiVersion: brigade.sh/v2
kind: Project
metadata:
  id: slack-demo
description: A project that demonstrates integration with Slack
spec:
  eventSubscriptions:
  - source: brigade.sh/slack
    qualifiers:
      appID: FAKEAPPID
    types:
    - "*"
  workerTemplate:
    defaultConfigFiles:
      brigade.js: |-
        const { events } = require("@brigadecore/brigadier");

        events.on("brigade.sh/slack", "demo", () => {
          console.log("Someone sent the /demo slash command!");
        });

        events.process();

In the alternative example below, we subscribe only to demo events:

apiVersion: brigade.sh/v2
kind: Project
metadata:
  id: slack-demo
description: A project that demonstrates integration with Slack
spec:
  eventSubscriptions:
  - source: brigade.sh/slack
    qualifiers:
      appID: FAKEAPPID
    types:
    - demo
  workerTemplate:
    defaultConfigFiles:
      brigade.js: |-
        const { events } = require("@brigadecore/brigadier");

        events.on("brigade.sh/slack", "demo", () => {
          console.log("Someone sent the /demo slash command!");
        });

        events.process();

Assuming this file were named project.yaml, you can create the project like so:

$ brig project create --file project.yaml

Typing /demo in a Slack channel should now send an event (slash command) from Slack to your gateway. The gateway, in turn, will emit the event into Brigade's event bus. Brigade should initialize a worker (containerized event handler) for every project that has subscribed to the event, and the worker should execute the brigade.js script that was embedded in the project definition.

List the events for the slack-demo project to confirm this:

$ brig event list --project slack-demo

Full coverage of brig commands is beyond the scope of this documentation, but at this point, additional brig commands can be applied to monitor the event's status and view logs produced in the course of handling the event.

Events Received and Emitted by this Gateway

Unlike most Brigade gateways, this gateway dynamically determines the value of the type field on events it emits into Brigade's event bus by simply stripping the leading slash (/) from the incoming slash command.

All events are qualified by appID and labeled with teamID (workspace ID), channelID, and userID. Qualifying events by appID ensures disambiguation if you are using multiple Slack Apps that each support one or more slash commands having the same names. Labeling events with teamID, channelID, and userID enables subscriptions to optionally be very specific about what events they're interested in.

Event payloads are composed of any text that followed the slash command when entered by the Slack user.

Here is an abbreviated representation of a sample event emitted by this gateway:

apiVersion: brigade.sh/v2
kind: Event
metadata:
  created: "2021-09-24T20:46:47.037Z"
  id: 33b0e475-1414-4142-a682-f7b916ad2989
projectID: slack-demo
source: brigade.sh/slack
qualifiers:
  appID: A02C3GPHM6D
labels:
  channelID: C02CU7ZMJMA
  teamID: TFNLDR3SP
  userID: UGN3UHXAM
type: demo
payload: foobar

Examples Projects

See examples/ for complete Brigade projects that demonstrate various scenarios.

Contributing

The Brigade project accepts contributions via GitHub pull requests. The Contributing document outlines the process to help get your contribution accepted.

Support & Feedback

We have a slack channel! Kubernetes/#brigade Feel free to join for any support questions or feedback, we are happy to help. To report an issue or to request a feature open an issue here

Code of Conduct

Participation in the Brigade project is governed by the CNCF Code of Conduct.