Connect to Slack

Put Scout in your Slack workspace as a teammate.

Scout reads Slack and responds to DMs and @mentions as a teammate. Each Slack thread becomes its own session so follow-ups carry forward without re-mentioning Scout.

The full setup, including the Slack app manifest and the complete scope list, lives in the Scout repo: SLACK_CONNECT.md.

Prerequisites

• Scout running locally (setup) or deployed
• A Slack workspace with admin privileges
• ngrok (local development only)

Step 1: Give Slack a URL it can reach

Slack delivers events (DMs, mentions, channel messages) by POSTing to a URL. That URL has to be reachable from Slack’s servers.

For local development, ngrok creates a public tunnel to a local port:

ngrok http 8000

Copy the https://...ngrok-free.app URL. For production, use your deployed Railway URL.

Free ngrok URLs rotate on every restart. If you stop and restart ngrok, you’ll need to update the URL in your Slack app’s Event Subscriptions page.

Step 2: Register the Slack app from a manifest

A Slack app is configured by a JSON manifest that declares its identity, scopes, and the events it should receive. A manifest keeps scopes explicit and reproducible.

The manifest requests the scopes Scout needs to read the workspace (search, channel and group history, IMs, user lookups) and to post replies. No admin scopes. Review the full list before installing.

Copy the manifest from SLACK_CONNECT.md, paste into Slack’s Create New App → From a manifest flow, and replace the placeholder URL with your URL from Step 1.

Step 3: Install Scout into your workspace

Installing the app creates the bot identity and issues the credentials Scout uses to authenticate every event and call. Two values to copy after install:

What	Where in Slack	Becomes
Bot User OAuth Token	Install App page	SLACK_BOT_TOKEN (xoxb-...)
Signing Secret	Basic Information → App Credentials	SLACK_SIGNING_SECRET

The signing secret is what Slack uses to sign every incoming event. Scout verifies the signature on every request, which is how it knows the event came from Slack and not someone spoofing your endpoint.

Step 4: Wire credentials and restart

Add both values to .env:

# .env
SLACK_BOT_TOKEN="xoxb-..."
SLACK_SIGNING_SECRET="..."

Restart:

docker compose up -d

Verify

Find Scout under Apps in the Slack sidebar and DM it:

hi
what contexts are registered?

Or invite it to a channel:

/invite @Scout
@Scout look up the latest pricing for Anthropic's models.

Troubleshooting

The most common failure is “Your URL didn’t respond” during Slack’s verification challenge. That happens when Scout isn’t running at the moment Slack POSTs the challenge. Restart Scout, then retry from your Slack app’s Event Subscriptions page.

If your ngrok URL has changed (free URLs rotate on restart), update the Request URL in Event Subscriptions and click Retry.

If Scout doesn’t respond to mentions, check docker compose logs -f scout-api for signature verification errors. These usually mean the SLACK_SIGNING_SECRET in .env doesn’t match the one in your Slack app’s Basic Information page.

For everything else, see SLACK_CONNECT.md.

How it works

Two things light up when both Slack env vars are set.

Slack as an interface. Scout uses Agno’s Slack interface. Each Slack thread timestamp becomes an AgentOS session ID, so threads stay isolated and follow-ups in the same thread don’t need to re-mention @Scout. Scout maps Slack user IDs to display names, so it can address you by name.

Slack as a context provider. Setting SLACK_BOT_TOKEN alone activates the Slack context provider. Scout gets a query_slack tool that works from any surface (the AgentOS UI, evals, scheduled tasks, or Slack itself). The provider is read-only by design. Slack posts go through the interface, not the context provider, so message authorship stays clean.

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