Asking for a Friend

Helping our Slack community ask questions without fear of being judged

Once installed in your workspace, try it out by clicking the lightning bolt at the bottom left of the text box in Slack and clicking Ask question anonymously in the list of shortcuts.

After asking your question, it will appear like this:

Development

Environment Variables

Project environment variables should first be defined in .env.sample without real values for their data (that file is tracked by git). After cloning, make sure to duplicate .env.sample as .env and then fill in all required variables using the details provided in the section below.

Dependencies

This project is reliant on the installation of the following dependencies:

• Node (LTS) (v18.0+)

After downloading the dependencies above, install all dependencies by running yarn.

Create a Slack App

Before being able to run the app locally, you'll need to create a Slack app and configure it with the appropriate permissions:

• Create an app on the Slack API Site
• Use the following manifest and update with your local or cloud URL:

display_information:
  name: Asking for a Friend
  description: Helping our community ask questions without fear of being judged
  background_color: "#004492"
features:
  bot_user:
    display_name: Asking for a Friend
    always_online: true
  shortcuts:
    - name: Ask question anonymously
      type: global
      callback_id: postAnonymousQuestion
      description: Posts an anonymous question in the current channel
oauth_config:
  scopes:
    bot:
      - chat:write
      - chat:write.public
      - commands
      - channels:read
settings:
  interactivity:
    is_enabled: true
    request_url: https://[YOUR-APP-URL]/slack/events
  org_deploy_enabled: false
  socket_mode_enabled: false
  token_rotation_enabled: false

Starting the App

The best way to start the app and work on it is by using yarn dev, which will start the app and then restart the app whenever a TypeScript file changes. After modifying a non-Typescript file, restart the app by typing rs into the same terminal you ran yarn dev from and then hitting return.

After the app starts, it will be accessible on localhost:3000 (unless the port was modified via .env).

Building and Running Docker Locally

1. Install relevant dependencies
2. Downloading Docker Desktop and start it
   • Optionally modify Settings > Resources > Advanced to provide more resources to Docker and speed up your build commands
3. Run yarn docker:build from the root to build your image
4. Run yarn docker:run to start your container
5. Visit localhost:3001 to use the app running in Docker

Contributing

Interested in contributing to the project? Check out our Contributing Guidelines.