If you need an agent to send messages to your Slack channel and/or retrieve Slack messages to action, SlackAgent can help you.

If you haven’t had a chance to read about how AG2’s Communication Platform agents and tools work, read the overview first.

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Installation

Install AG2 with the LLM model provider and Slack platform extra.

pip install ag2[openai,commsagent-slack]

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Capabilities

SlackAgent can:

  • Construct and send a message to the configured channel. If a message is longer than the platforms permitted message length, they will split the message into multiple messages.
  • Retrieve the latest X messages from a channel.
  • Retrieve messages since a given date.
  • Retrieve messages since a given message ID.
  • Retrieve a message given its ID.

It will also automatically append Slack’s messaging requirements to the system message:

  • 40,000 character limit
  • Markdown
  • bold/italic/code
  • emojis
  • notification formats

This is on by default, but you can turn these off by setting has_writing_instructions to False when creating the agent.

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In-built Tools

The SlackAgent has two in-built tools that it will call upon as it needs:

Find out more about these tools and how you can add them to your own AG2 agents in the Slack Tools documentation.

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Platform configuration

Each agent is configured for a specific channel. This configuration is applied when you create the agent.

The SlackAgent require authentication (OAuth token) and channel details in order to send/retrieve messages.

Here are the steps to get a token:

  • Create an app, from scratch, at https://api.slack.com/apps
  • In your app settings, go to Features > OAuth & Permissions:
    • Under “Bot Token Scopes”, add these permissions:
      • chat:write (to send messages)
      • channels:history
      • channels:read (to access channel info)
      • groups:read (for private channels)
      • im:read (for direct messages)
      • users:read (to get user info)
      • files:read (to access file attachments)
      • groups:history
      • im:history
      • mpim:history
  • With your app setup, now install it in your workspace, using the “Install App” menu, to create an OAuth Token.

To get the ID for your channel:

  • Open Slack in a browser
  • Navigate to your channel
  • Get the channel ID from the URL (e.g., …/C12345678)

Finally you need to add the bot to your channel:

  • In Slack, go to your channel
  • Type /invite @YourBotName, e.g. /invite @ag2commsagent

Now you should be good to go with your OAuth token, channel ID, and a bot on your channel ready to send and retrieve messages!

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Code example

Here’s a simple example using the SlackAgent that gets the current weather and sends a message to a Slack channel to give them a weather forecast.

# Agents are available in the autogen.agents namespace
from autogen import ConversableAgent, register_function, LLMConfig
from autogen.agents.experimental import SlackAgent

# For running the code in Jupyter, use nest_asyncio to allow nested event loops
#import nest_asyncio
#nest_asyncio.apply()

llm_config = LLMConfig(model="gpt-4o-mini", api_type="openai")

# Our Slack credentials
_bot_token = "xoxo..."  # OAuth token
_channel_id = "C1234567"  # ID of the Slack channel

# Our tool executor agent, which will run the tools once recommended by the slack_agent, no LLM required
executor_agent = ConversableAgent(
    name="executor_agent",
    human_input_mode="NEVER",
)

with llm_config:
    slack_agent = SlackAgent(
        name="slack_agent",
        bot_token=_bot_token,
        channel_id=_channel_id,
    )

# We get the registered tools and register them for execution with the tool executor
for tool in slack_agent.tools:
    tool.register_for_execution(executor_agent)

# Weather function
def get_weather():
    return "The weather today is 25 degrees Celsius and sunny, with a late storm."

# Register for LLM recommendation with our slack_agent and for execution with our executor_agent
register_function(
    get_weather,
    caller=slack_agent,
    executor=executor_agent,
    description="Get the current weather forecast",
)

# Ask the SlackAgent to get the weather (using the get_weather tool) and then send a message out (using its SlackSendTool tool)
executor_agent.initiate_chat(
    recipient=slack_agent,
    message="Get the latest weather forecast and send it to our Slack channel. Use some emojis to make it fun!",
    max_turns=3,
)

Here’s the message it sent:

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