Summary

This pull request is still work in progress. We may change the APIs and/or implementations before releasing this.

The changes here include all required functionalities for Socket Mode support, such as WSS URL acquisition, bidirectional communications with the Slack server over a WebSocket connection, maintaining WS connections, and relaying only envelope messages to Bolt framework or something similar.

The basic usage of the module would be:

from threading import Event
from slack_sdk.socket_mode.response import SocketModeResponse
from slack_sdk.socket_mode.request import SocketModeRequest
from slack_sdk.socket_mode import SocketModeClient

def listener(client: SocketModeClient, req: SocketModeRequest):
    if req.type == "events_api":
        # acknowledge the incoming request from Slack
        client.send_socket_mode_response(SocketModeResponse(envelope_id=req.envelope_id))

        # can call Web APIs and whatever you want to do here
        client.web_client.reactions_add(
            token="xoxb-___",
            name="eyes",
            channel=req.payload["event"]["channel"],
            timestamp=req.payload["event"]["ts"],
        )

if __name__ == "__main__":
    client = SocketModeClient(app_token="xapp-___")
    client.socket_mode_request_listeners.append(listener)
    client.connect()
    Event().wait()

If you want to use Socket Mode along with asyncio, the default way is to use AIOHTTP library as with the AsyncWebClient.

import asyncio
from slack_sdk.socket_mode.response import SocketModeResponse
from slack_sdk.socket_mode.request import SocketModeRequest
from slack_sdk.socket_mode.async_client import SocketModeClient

async def listener(client: SocketModeClient, req: SocketModeRequest):
    if req.type == "events_api":
        await client.send_socket_mode_response(SocketModeResponse(envelope_id=req.envelope_id))
        await client.web_client.reactions_add(
            token="xoxb-___",
            name="eyes",
            channel=req.payload["event"]["channel"],
            timestamp=req.payload["event"]["ts"],
        )

async def main():
    client = SocketModeClient(app_token="xapp-___")
    client.socket_mode_request_listeners.append(listener)
    await client.connect()
    await asyncio.sleep(float("inf"))

asyncio.run(main())

Supported External Libraries

In the initial version, the SDK is going to support the following major libraries for the low-level WebSocket client layer, in addition to its own built-in implementation.

• websocket-client: https://github.com/websocket-client/websocket-client
• websockets: https://websockets.readthedocs.io/
• aiohttp: https://docs.aiohttp.org/en/stable/client_quickstart.html#websockets

We decided not to support the following libraries at least in v3.2 series.

• autobahn: https://github.com/crossbario/autobahn-python
• tornado: https://www.tornadoweb.org/en/stable/websocket.html
• ws4py: https://ws4py.readthedocs.io/en/latest/sources/clienttutorial/

The BaseSocketModeClient and AsyncBaseSocketModeClient provide good abstraction and the interface never depends on any of these specific library's interface. We accept the difference of a bit detailed configuration in the subtypes of the interface. For instance, websockets library does not support proxy settings at this moment. As aiohttp does not have OPEN message events, the implementation for this library does not offer on_open_listeners. These differences never appear in the base class (interface) level.

Other things that should be mentioned

• The GA release date is not yet publicly announced
• Documentation is out of scope in this PR

Category (place an x in each of the [ ])

• slack_sdk.socket_mode (New one!)

Requirements (place an x in each [ ])

• I've read and understood the Contributing Guidelines and have done my best effort to follow them.
• I've read and agree to the Code of Conduct.
• I've run python setup.py validate after making the changes.