Slack Sections Organizer

Organize your Slack sections to mirror your team's user groups and default channels.

Features

• Create sections in Slack's left navigation for the specified user groups.
• Organize each user group's default channels into the corresponding section.
• Automatically join channels.
• Detect channels that are in multiple user groups and prompt for section designation.
• Automatically delete empty sections after organization is complete.

Installation

• This app requires node and npm to run. Refer to the Node Version Manager instructions for installation (recommended), or you may install them directly here.
• Clone this repo ([email protected]:vendrinc/slack-sections-organizer.git) or if you do not have git installed download the zip
• From the repo root directory, run npm install && npm run build

Configuration

Because this app uses non-published Slack APIs for managing sections, you must configure the app with a token and cookie retrieved from the Slack web app:

1. Copy .env.template to .env. The new .env file is where you will configure your SLACK_COOKIE and SLACK_XOXC_TOKEN values.
2. Log in to the Slack web app in Chrome via your team's Slack URL (teamname.slack.com)
3. Open developer tools (Mac: cmd-option-i) and click on the Network tab.
4. In the Filter box, type .list, click Fetch/XHR, and then reload the browser.
5. Click any of the request rows in the Name box and click the Headers tab.
6. Scroll down to Request Headers -> Cookie.
7. Highlight and copy the entire Cookie value and paste it in .env as the SLACK_COOKIE value.
   • Note: You may opt to copy just the sub-value d=xoxd-...; and paste that in .env as the SLACK_COOKIE value. That's the important part!
8. Click the Payload tab and find Form Data -> token.
9. Highlight and copy the token value (xoxc-abc...123) and paste it in .env as the SLACK_XOXC_TOKEN value.
10. Save the .env file.

WARNING: The SLACK_COOKIE and SLACK_XOXC_TOKEN secrets provide authenticated access to your Slack account. These values must be kept private. Do NOT share or distribute them.

Usage

• To run the app, from the repo root directory run npm start -- <command line options>
• The following command line options are available:
  • -g, --group-handle string[] User group handles. Create and organize sections for the named user groups.
    • ex: npm start -- -g my-user-group my-other-user-group This will organize sections for the user groups with the handles my-user-group and my-other-user-group
  • -t, --group-desc-tag string[] User group description tag. Create and organize sections for all user groups containing one or more tags in the description.
    • ex: npm start -- -t engineering This will organize sections for all user groups with the tag engineering in the user group description.
  • -j, --join-channels Join all channels in the user groups. Defaults to true. Set to false to disable.
  • -d, --delete-empty-sections Delete empty sections after completing organization. Defaults to true. Set to false to disable.
  • -h, --help Display help information

Note: You may combine -g and -t to organize the union of user groups specified.