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Steps for building an app

Steps to get started with building your own Slack apps.

1. Outline your app's features and automations​

After figuring out how your app will help make other people's work simpler and more productive, list the use cases that your app will cover.

Start planning the workflows to automate your processes. To decide which flows make sense to hook into, it’s helpful to know how you can use Actioner workflows to extend your use cases in Slack.

Your app can consist of workflows that

  • are triggered manually from /actioner command in Slack or from a button in a Slack notifcation.
  • are triggered by events happening in your Slack workspace
  • are triggered by events happening in your tools

You can add actions to your workflows to

  • execute Slack-specific actions, such as notifying a user or creating a collaboration channel
  • perform an operation in your applications, such as creating a ticket or updating a deal

2. Create a new app from scratch​

To create a new app, go to My apps page from left menu and click + Add new app at top left corner. Select Start from scratch option.

Add a new app

3. Design your workflows​

Workflow canvas is a flexible visual no-code designer tool, used for creating and customizing workflows. Below you will find recommended designing steps. Keep in mind that you can always go back and forth between nodes in your workflow and revisit any node later on. Your progress on your workflows is automatically saved as you update any node.

Steps for designing workflows​

  1. Create a new workflow.

  2. Select your trigger. Available options are

  3. If you selected a manual trigger, add your inputs.

  4. If you selected a webhook or an event from an integration, set up rules specifying the conditions to start your workflow.

  5. Start adding your nodes. Available options are

  6. If you selected an action from an integration, complete your connection. For a workflow to communicate with your tool, it has to be authorized to interact with it. This authorization is referred as connection. Connections simply enable actions in your workflows to send API requests to perform a task or retrieve data.

  7. Pass data from your events to your actions. To pass data from an event payload to a step, you can use {{event}} notation. To reference to the value of name object in the body your event's payload {{event.body.name}} inside curlies. As you type, Actioner autocompletes you with suggesting next objects as available options.

  8. Pass data between workflow steps. You can use any data in the context of an earlier step.

    • To get data from an action, use {{nodes.action0.response}} where action0 is the alias of the action added to your workflow.
    • To get data from the context of your workflow, use {{context.get('key')}}. Make sure that you have added a function that is executed in an earlier step and puts the key in the context of your workflow.
    • To get data from a loop operator, use {{nodes.loop0.items}} where loop0 is the alias of the loop operator added to your workflow.

  9. When all is set, Apply changes to your workflow.