Courier Live: Trick-or-Treating From a Distance Using Slack

For our Pre-Halloween October 28th Courier Live, Nate Munger returned to help me come up with a socially distanced way to handle Trick-or-Treaters using Courier. Taking inspiration from the Smart Security Camera RaspberryPi project, we thought it would be cool to disguise one of those as a Halloween decoration and have it send images of approaching Trick-or-Treaters to a Slack channel with buttons that would allow members to present them with a Trick or a Treat. We walked through setting up the Slack notification in Courier and handling the buttons using a Glitch app. We'll leave delivering the tricks and treats to you.

Check out the video below to watch us:

• Create a new Slack App and install it to our test workspace
• Build a new Slack notification with action buttons using Courier
• Use a Glitch Node.js/ExpressJS application to handle the Slack button actions
• Send the notification using the Courier Send tab

Code for the Node.js/ExpressJS server handling the Slack actions can be found in the Glitch application.

Be sure to Like the video and Subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Adding Custom Slack Buttons

For this project, we wanted to have 2 Slack buttons side by side. To do this, we used the Jsonnet block to build a Block Kit Actions Block. The following code when used in a Jsonnet block will result in the following:

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{
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    "type": "actions",
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    "elements": [
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        {
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            "type": "button",
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            "action_id": "btnTrick",
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            "text": {
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                "type": "plain_text",
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                "text": "Trick :ghost:",
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                "emoji": true
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            },
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            "value": "trick"
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        },
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        {
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            "type": "button",
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            "action_id": "btnTreat",
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            "text": {
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                "type": "plain_text",
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                "text": "Treat :candy:",
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                "emoji": true
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            },
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            "value": "treat"
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        }
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    ]
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}

The actions for the resulting buttons can be handled using a server like we created above. Action Blocks can be more than just buttons. Check out the other available Interactive Block elements.

Is there something you’d like to see us do using Courier? Let us know and it might be the subject of our next Courier Live. We stream a new Courier Live every Wednesday at noon Pacific. Follow us on Twitch to be notified when we go live.

-Aydrian