Access Slack files from a slack bot

Question

I need a slack bot that's able to receive and save files send from slack chatrooms.

The problem is: slack doesn't send file contents, but an array of links pointing to the file. Most of them, including download link are private and cannot be accessed via bot. It does send one public link, but that link points at the file preview, which does not have the file itself (here's an example).

So the question is: how can I access uploaded files via bot?

Answer 1

You can access private URLs from your bot by providing an access token in the HTTP header when you are doing you CURL request.

Your token needs to have the scope files.read in order to get access.

The format is:

Authorization: Bearer A_VALID_TOKEN 

Replace A_VALID_TOKEN with your slack access token.

I just tested it with a simple PHP script to retrieve a file by its "url_private" and it works nicely.

Source: Slack API documententation / file object / Authentication

Answer 2

Example for using the Python requests library to fetch an example file:

import requests url = 'https://slack-files.com/T0JU09BGC-F0UD6SJ21-a762ad74d3' token = 'xoxp-8853424449-8820034832-8891394196-faf6f0' requests.get(url, headers={'Authorization': 'Bearer %s' % token})