skills/setup-slack-channel/references/optional-e2e.md
Only worth running after a real human mention has been answered. If the managed round trip does not work, the harness will not tell you why — it will just fail in a more complicated way.
examples/OpenTag ships an API-first harness that posts real messages to a Slack
test channel, polls for replies while they stream, and writes a JSON report to
e2e/results/. It covers mentions, threads, streaming text, rich blocks,
follow-up turns, and interruptions.
This is the one exception to "Slack tokens never go in .env", and the reason
is that the harness is not the Channel — it is a test client driving the Slack
Web API directly, in order to act like a human user. Intelligence still owns the
Channel's own Slack attachment. These are test-harness credentials, not runtime
configuration.
The developer adds these to the root .env themselves:
| Variable | What it is | Why the harness needs it |
|---|---|---|
SLACK_BOT_TOKEN | xoxb-… | Read channel history and thread replies |
SLACK_USER_TOKEN | xoxp-… | Post as a real user, so Slack emits a genuine user event |
BOT_USER_ID | U… | Identify the bot in replies |
E2E_CHANNEL | C… | The test channel id |
The user token is the one to be deliberate about: it acts as the developer in their workspace. It must be obtained through their approved app-management flow and typed in by them. Never ask for it, never read its value, never suggest a workaround for getting one.
The Channel wizard's manifest declares no user scopes, so a managed app has no
xoxp- token to collect. Running this harness therefore means adding a
chat:write user scope to the app and reinstalling — which rotates the bot
token and requires re-entering it in the adapter. Say that cost out loud before
starting, and treat it as a deliberate, separately-approved change rather than a
step of the main workflow. If the developer does not want to touch the working
app's scopes, that is a good reason to skip this phase entirely.
The starter states its own boundary explicitly: the repository intentionally contains no browser automation that edits the manifest, reinstalls the app, or extracts tokens. Respect that — do not add any.
Start the agent and the runtime, confirm the Channel is online, then:
pnpm e2e
A subset, by case-name substring:
CASE_FILTER='A1' pnpm e2e
Cases live in e2e/cases.ts; the entrypoint is e2e/run.ts and the Slack API
helpers are in e2e/slack-api.ts. Read e2e/README.md before running — it is the
authority on the harness's current requirements.
The harness exercises the whole path, so a failure is not necessarily a harness problem. Separate the layers before concluding anything:
| Symptom | Likely layer |
|---|---|
| No reply at all to any case | The Channel is not online, or the bot is not in E2E_CHANNEL. Not a harness bug. |
| Auth errors from the Slack API | A token is wrong, expired, or from a different app than the one installed in that workspace. |
| Replies arrive but assertions fail on content | The agent or the Channel's rendering — the delivery path is fine. |
| Some cases pass, some time out inconsistently | Suspect a second consumer racing for deliveries, an inbound dedup drop, or a shared agent instance serializing unrelated conversations. See troubleshooting.md. |