A neat interface for Slack

Your company got you Slack and you're all like "yeah, and now I am forced to
use a browser or what?". Fear no more, because as it turns out Slack has a REST
API that can be accessed.

Yeah, scripting Slack via curl sucks, so let's do something that sucks less.
Maybe a bit? How about using an existing
integration? They are incomplete or for
sucky languages? Glad you asked, because I have just the right thing for you:
a neat interface to Slack via OCaml!

What do you need? OCaml, OPAM and a Slack token. All for free, no asterisks, no
hidden clauses. Life can be so easy.

Install that cow!

Huzzah, I got you interested? Lucky you, Slacko can easily be installed via
OCaml Package Manager (OPAM), so you just write

$ opam install slacko

Now wasn't this easy? Bet your ass it was! And you know what? It even gets
better: it also installed you a nifty little executable called slack-notify
which you can use to post directly to Slack from your shell, no programming
required at all. Actually, once compiled, not even OCaml is required anymore,
everything is self-contained.

In case you want to manually install it, you can, too. There's a number of
dependencies that you have to take care of yourself, for the list you'll have
to check the slacko.opam file.

Then you can build Slacko by yourself:

$ make

How do I even use this thing?

The workflow is always very simple: you get a token from Slack either manually
or my querying the OAuth API. Then you can instantly use any API method that
Slacko supports. If you want, you can look at snapshot of
the Slacko docs to see what
functions are available (hint: all of them).

Ready, set, go!

Not convinced yet? Check out this neat documentation from slack-notify to
help you out.

NAME
       slack-notify - Writes messages to slack

SYNOPSIS
       slack-notify [OPTION]... CHANNEL MSG

ARGUMENTS
       CHANNEL
           Name of the channel to post to

       MSG Message to send

OPTIONS
       --help[=FMT] (default=pager)
           Show this help in format FMT (pager, plain or groff).

       --icon-emoji=EMOJI
           emoji to use as the icon for this message. Overrides icon-url

       --icon-url=URL
           URL to an image to use as the icon for this message

       -t TOKEN, --token=TOKEN
           The Slack API access token

       -u USERNAME, --username=USERNAME
           Name of the bot in the chat

So what is this token thing? Once you signed up for Slack, you can get a token
for every team you are in from the Slack API docs.
Click on the "get token" link and you're all set.

But I do want to code my own stuff!

You know, Slacko is a nice gal/guy. So you can just plug together whatever you
want with it, since it currently implements 100% of the Slack
API! Well, except for the Real-Time-Messaging
part, which is on our TODO! How neat is this? And you can use it in your own
code without worrying about the license one bit, since the
LGPL 3.0 is liberal for re-use,
coupled with the
OCaml linking exception.
For realz!

Something's amiss?

I know, I know, it is hardly believable that something could possibly be
missing from this library. But wonders happen, and if you run into one of these
cases, just shoot me a pull request.

Credit where credit's due

Thanks go to all the people who wrote
CoHTTP, a real-world HTTP library
that doesn't suck and Lwt, an oddball library that
subconsciously makes sense. Also, the fine folks in
#ocaml on
freenode.