destalinator

Code for managing Cleanup of Stale Channels

Making it work in your environment

You'll need to install a few libraries: pip install -r requirements.txt

You'll also need to change configuration.yaml appropriately. warner.py and archiver.py should then work from the command line. Productionized automated deployments and running on a schedule are left unspecified because every production environment is unique.

That said, if you're running on Heroku, you can create a single clock process that runs python scheduler.py.

AWS Lambda

You can also run Destalinator using AWS Lambda.

Steps

pip install -r requirements.txt -t . --upgrade
zip -r destalinator.zip .

Upload this folder to a Python 2.7 Lambda function. Use Lambda Environment Variables to control your configuration (See the Environment variables section below). Make sure to use the RUN_ONCE=true flag as well. Set the function handler to scheduler.destalinate_lambda. Also set the function timeout to 15 minutes. Finally, create a CloudWatch Events cron trigger to run your function once a day. Create a cron called Daily with the cron expression cron(0 10 * * ? *).

NOTE: Destalinator logging is to a local file so the CloudWatch logs will be sparse. This can make debugging difficult.

Development

We recommend using virtualenv to manage your development environment.

pip install virtualenv
virtualenv env
source env/bin/activate

In addition to requirements.txt, there's also build-requirements.txt for development environments. ./bin/install will install both.

Docker

Build a local docker image:

docker build . -t destalinator

Checking code coverage locally

docker run -it -p 8080:80 destalinator sh -c "coverage html --skip-covered && python -m http.server 80"

open http://localhost:8080/htmlcov/

Components

Warner

The Warner notifies channels that have been inactive for a period of time.

Archiver

The archiver archives channels that have been inactive for a period of time.

Announcer

The Announcer will notify a channel of all new channels created within a period of time.

Flagger

The Flagger uses a ruleset defined in a specific channel to perform actions such as notifying channels of messages that have received a certain number of reactions.

Setup

Inside configuration.yaml

slack_name

You'll want to change this to the name of your Slack

warn_threshold and archive_threshold

Tune these two variables to decide how long after inactivity a channel should be warned for inactivity and then subsequently archived.

general_message_channel, announce_channel, control_channel, and log_channel

These channels need to be manually created by you in your Slack.

Environment variables

All configs in configuration.yaml are overrideable through environment variables with the same name prefixed by DESTALINATOR_ (e.g. activated -> DESTALINATOR_ACTIVATED). Set array environment variables (e.g. DESTALINATOR_IGNORE_CHANNELS) by comma delimiting items. If you only have one value for an array type environment variable add a training comma to denote the variable as a list.

DESTALINATOR_SB_TOKEN (Required)

1. Make sure the Slackbot app is installed for your Slack
2. Add a Slackbot integration, and copy the token parameter from the URL provided

DESTALINATOR_API_TOKEN (Required)

The best way to get an API_TOKEN is to create a new Slack App.

Once you create and name your app on your team, go to "OAuth & Permissions" to give it the following permission scopes:

• channels:history
• channels:read
• channels:write
• chat:write:bot
• chat:write:user
• emoji:read
• users:read

After saving, you can copy the OAuth Access Token value from the top of the same screen. It probably starts with xox.

DESTALINATOR_ACTIVATED (Required)

Destalinator can be chatty and make potentially big changes to a Slack team (by warning or archiving a large amount of channels), especially when first installed.

To minimize the risk of making a mistake, Destalinator will run in a dry-run mode unless the DESTALINATOR_ACTIVATED environment variable exists. Set it to true and Destalinator is "active." If you want to remain in dry-run mode, ensure this variable is unset/does not exist.

DESTALINATOR_LOG_LEVEL (Optional; Default: WARNING)

Tune your preferred log level for server logs or local debugging. Does not affect the ENV var specified by output_debug_env_varname.

DESTALINATOR_LOG_TO_CHANNEL (Optional)

If you would like to log to a Slack channel as well as the default log destination, you can set true here. The channel will then be pulled from log_channel in configuration.yaml.

DESTALINATOR_EARLIEST_ARCHIVE_DATE (Optional)

If you don't want to start archiving channels until a certain date right after introducing destalinator to your team, you can set an ISO-8601 date here (YYYY-mm-dd).

DESTALINATOR_FLAGGER_DISABLED (Optional)

Disable the Flagger by setting DESTALINATOR_FLAGGER_DISABLED to true

DESTALINATOR_SCHEDULE_HOUR (Optional)

When should the destalinator run? Defaults to 4. Which time that means depends on your operating system time zone. Good luck!

SENTRY_DSN (Optional)

Note: No DESTALINATOR_ prefix! The Sentry plugin uses this environment variable on its own.

If you would like to configure exception handling & tracking with Sentry, set up a Sentry account and configure this environment variable with the appropriate DSN value.

If you're on Heroku, you can provision this with:

heroku addons:create sentry:f1

Code of Conduct

As part of the Rands Leadership Slack community, the Rands Leadership Slack Code of Conduct applies to this project.