Create Slack App

The first thing to do is to create a Slack application for your bot.

Visit your Slack Apps Dashboard and click on "Create New App". Pick the "from scratch" option. Enter a name for the app, pick the workspace you want to build in, and finally click on "Create App".

Configure

Your Slack bot needs a few configuration bits to be in place. Let's set them up now.

1. App Home

Under "Features → App Home", select the "Home Tab" toggle so that the app can present a home screen to the user when they try to view the bot's profile in Slack. We'll later use the home screen to allow end users to manage their subscription.

Also feel free to enable the "Always Show My Bot as Online" toggle so the bot does not show as offline when your users are interacting with it. 🙃

2. Interactivity & Shortcuts

Under "Features → Interactivity & Shortcuts", enable the "Interactivity" toggle. In the "Request URL" text input, paste the ngrok link you set up in the previous step and append /slack/events/ to it.

The final configuration should look something like this.

3. OAuth & Permissions

In this section we need to set up two configuration bits.

3.1 Redirect URLs

In the "Features → Redirect URLs", add the ngrok link you set up in the previous step and append /slack/oauth_redirect/ to it. The final result should look like this:

3.2 App Scopes

Next, in the "Features → OAuth & Permissions → Scopes" section, use the "Add an OAuth scope" button to add the following scopes: app_mentions:read, chat:write, and team:read.

4. Event Subscriptions

Finally, in the "Features → Event Subscriptions" section, add the ngrok link you set up in the previous step and append /slack/events/ to it. On the same page, use the "Add Bot User Event" to subscribe the bot to the app_home_opened and app_mention events.

The final result should look like this:

Amazing. Now that the Slack app has been set up, let's set up Polar for payments and we'll be up and running in no time!