Integrating Slack into a Retool App: It’s Easier Than You May Think

Both large businesses and small teams need effective communication and streamlined workflows today. While Retool is a strong platform that assists users in creating personalized internal tools with minimum coding, it hardly facilitates this communication need. Like many other IT companies, we at Akveo use Slack as a business messenger. Slack might not be as popular as Microsoft Teams, but still is a very notable player on the market. Why I’ve mentioned this? Retool has a native Slack integration, and today we’ll explore it together.

What is Slack?

Slack is an instant messaging and collaboration app designed for real-time communication between team members. It features channels, direct messaging, file sharing, and real-time video conferences. With its user-friendly design plus advanced functionalities, Slack has become the leading choice in businesses looking forward to improving their teamwork and communications within organizations.

Possible Use Cases

• Automated Notifications. Retool’s Slack integration lets automate notifications and alerts. Information from a Retool app can be posted to Slack channels. As a result, any updates, changes, or issues are passed on quickly to the team members who can react immediately.

• Interactive Workflows. Retool enables users to create interactive workflows that launch actions in Retool applications based on specific events from Slack. It includes filling out forms, updating records, or starting processes without leaving the Slack interface.

• Data Retrieval and Display. It’s possible to use Retool to pull data from multiple sources, process them, and then display them within Slack. This feature is especially important when sharing reports, metrics, and insights with the rest of the team to provide additional context for conversations.

Slack Resource Setup

Good news: the Retool Slack resource setup is pretty easy. News: the official guide is messy and unclear. Let’s fix this!

To connect to Slack, Retool uses OAuth 2.0. In practice, it means that you need to create a ‘service’ account in your Slack workspace and authenticate using its credentials during the resource creation in Retool. In this guide, I’ll use my regular credentials - but it doesn’t matter.

Now go to Resources - click on Create - and select API - Slack. You will see something like this:

Retool automatically fills in the scopes list - it adds everything you may need, but you might decide to narrow it down.

Also, note the ‘Share credentials between users’ checkbox. If you want to use a service account credentials, you should leave it checked. Otherwise, each user will be asked to log in to Slack.

Let’s add the name, ‘slack_test’, and then let’s click on the ‘Connect with OAuth’ button.

You will see a bit confusing screen: it will show your current Retool user email address as the one being connected to Slack. Don’t panic, just click Authenticate - you’ll be able to fill in correct credentials later.

Now be prepared to enter your Slack workspace URL. It looks like ‘sometext.slack.com’. If you are not sure, open the Slack app. From the Home tab, swipe right to open the main menu. Locate your workspace's Slack URL below the workspace name. Now we can paste it to the input box to continue:

Now, after pressing the ‘Continue’ button (you have clicked on it, right?), you will see the next window - and select an appropriate login method. I chose email, that’s why I put it in:

In the next step, you will be asked to enter the code, and after successful login, you will see the last screen. It will ask you about the permissions for the Retool connector, so just click on Allow.

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If everything works okay, you will see a green prompt ‘Connected’. However, please, remember, that Retool can’t check all the scopes to be working, it only validates authorization itself.

Testing Slack Connection

Let’s now check the connection to make sure that it works. The newly created ‘slack_test’ resource should be available in your apps. Let’s create a query, and send a message to a channel.

For testing, we will use a channel called ‘deal-test’, and send a message from the text input:

When everything is ready, let’s fire the button - and we will see a new message on the channel. It works!

By the way, the connection is bidirectional. It means that you can also get the data from Slack and display it in a Retool app. Here’s an example: I’m getting the list of all the channels, and displaying their IDs and names as a list view:

Conclusion

As you can see, Retool’s Slack integration works in a very straightforward way. It might be confusing in the very beginning, but when you try it for the first time, you’ll understand the logic behind it. As usual, if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask for help. The Akveo Team is always ready to help.

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Dmitry is the Head of Low-Code Department at Akveo. With a rich background in media and marketing, Dmitry brings an extraordinary look at the world of IT technologies. He is deeply passionate about finding the most effective and elegant solutions to complex client problems. In our blog articles, Dmitry will share his expertise in Retool and other low-code platforms to offer you valuable insights on Retool to enhance business process efficiency.

We already discusses with him how to use Retool Workflows, how to improve application security, how to schedule changes, how to generate and send email reports, what is Retool Database, and how to work with Retool Dynamic Tables. More topics are coming. Stay tuned!

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