slack-archivebot

A simple Go app that will automatically archive public channels on the following criteria:

• if the channel is empty; or
• if the channel has had no activity for the last X days.

A configurable message will be posted to the channel prior to archival.

Use

The poject uses godep to manage dependencies, so you'll need that. Once you've cloned this repo into your $GOPATH:

cd path/to/slack-archivebot
godep go build
./slack-archivebot

Deployment

Heroku is the simplest option. The script can run quite happily on a free dyno using the Heroku Scheduler add-on.

Note: the above will deploy the app to your Heroku account, and add the Scheduler add-on, but won't configure it to run. To do this, go to your dashboard, find the appropriate app, open the Scheduler add-on, and add a new job that runs slack-archivebot every 10 minutes.

Configuration

The following environment variables are used to configure the script:

• ARCHIVEBOT_SLACK_TOKEN: the Slack Web API key for your team.
• ARCHIVEBOT_NOTIFY: a Slack user or channel (e.g. #general or @tblair) to notify when something goes wrong.
• ARCHIVEBOT_INACTIVE_DAYS: the number of days' inactivity after which to archive a channel (default: 30).
• ARCHIVEBOT_INACTIVE_MESSAGE: A customized message to post to an inactive channel before it is archived. The default message if none is provided is: "We will now be archiving this channel because it has been inactive for X days." where X is defined by ARCHIVEBOT_INACTIVE_DAYS.
• ARCHIVEBOT_NO_INACTIVES: Set this to "true" to disable archiving of inactive channels. Any other value or unset will archive inactive channels.
• ARCHIVEBOT_EMPTY_MESSAGE: A customized message to post to an empty channel before it is archived. The default message if none is provided is: "We will now be archiving this channel because it no longer has any members."
• ARCHIVEBOT_NO_EMPTIES: Set this to "true" to disable archiving of empty channels. Any other value or unset will archive empty channels.
• ARCHIVEBOT_CHANNEL_WHITELIST: A comma separated list of channel names (without # symbols) that will be excluded from the archival list. You should at least include your general channel here to avoid errors when attempting to archive the general channel.
• ARCHIVEBOT_DEBUG: Set this to "true" to enable debugging messages that will be sent to ARCHIVEBOT_NOTIFY. Any other value does nothing. This is especially usefull during testing or initial runs.

Note: you must use an API key for a regular Slack user account. You cannot use a bot user account, because bot users don't have permission to archive channels.

Licensing and Attribution

slack-archivebot is released under the MIT license as detailed in the LICENSE file that should be distributed with this library; the source code is freely available.

slack-archivebot was developed by Tim Blair during a Venntro hack day.