Setting up wee-slack

2018-12-21

Installing the prerequisites

First, we need to install the base weechat binaries. I like the aspell plugin to be enabled in Weechat, so I'll install that first:

$ brew install aspell
$ aspell dicts # Check the available dictionaries.

Now, it's time to install weechat itself. Weechat has just gone through a transition between Python2 and Python3, and at the time of writing, installing from brew is affected by this bug, so we're going to explicitly install with Python2 support, and we will install the websocket_client library in the Python2 tree.

$ brew install weechat --with-aspell --with-python@2
$ sudo /usr/local/opt/python@2/bin/pip2 install websocket_client

Installing wee-slack

Now it's time to install the wee-slack plugin. There are more secure ways to do this, but this will work for the purposes of this guide:

$ mkdir -p ~/.weechat/python/autoload
$ cd ~/.weechat/python/autoload
$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wee-slack/wee-slack/master/wee_slack.py

Now, launch weechat, and you'll see the following message:

ERROR: Failed connecting to Slack with token starting with INSERT
VALID KE: invalid_auth
ERROR: Token does not look like a valid Slack token. Ensure it is a valid token and not just a OAuth code.

To register, in the weechat console, type:

/slack register

Follow the prompts onscreen. The redirect after authentication will fail, and this is expected, however you need to copy the code parameter from the redirect URL.

Return to weechat, and enter the following:

/slack register [your code parameter here]
/python reload slack

You should now be connected to your Slack instance. You can navigate using common IRC commands such as /join and /query. If you're setting up weechat for the first time, it will feel more comfortable to turn on mouse mode, which you can do like this:

/set weechat.look.mouse on
/mouse enable

In general, wee-slack works well. Certain integrations which post rich snippets to Slack (for example, the Bitbucket plugin) are quite visually noisy in Weechat, so I want t figure out how to filter or rewrite these to be more concise. But that's for another day.