Can we send message to user in slack using python script?

Question

In a slack team, can we send a message to a user using python? I have seen various APIs, they offer message to channel, but not to a particular user. Can we do that?

Answer 1

Yes,this can be done. Instead of "#channel_name" use "@user" in the API. The user will receive the message from slackbot as we are using API and not a direct message from any other user. And if you want to post to that user as the authenticated user, use as_user= true.

slack.chat.post_message('@to_user',msg,username='@from_user')

More details are at https://api.slack.com/methods/chat.postMessage

Answer 2

SImple solution is using Slack's Web API and requests:

import requests

# slack access bot token
slack_token = "xpxb-9534042403-731932630054-KSwhrmhg87TXGuF23Z4ipTRm"

data = {
    'token': slack_token,
    'channel': 'UJ24R2MPE',    # User ID. 
    'as_user': True,
    'text': "GO Home!"
}

requests.post(url='https://slack.com/api/chat.postMessage',
              data=data)

userID you can get here:

Answer 3

This was the Python solution I found using the SlackClient package:

from slackclient import SlackClient

slack_token = os.environ["SLACK_API_TOKEN"]
sc = SlackClient(slack_token)

sc.api_call(
  "chat.postMessage",
  channel="@username",
  text="Test Message"
)

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/slackclient