Skip to content
Joe Documentation
Guides
The Slack bot

The Slack bot

joe slack connects Joe to Slack so your team can talk to it from a channel. It runs over Slack Socket Mode, so it needs no public URL or inbound webhook. Like joe mcp, it is a daemon client, not a second server: it holds a Socket Mode connection to Slack and forwards to a running joe server over HTTP. It does not bind a port of its own.

Tokens and environment

joe slack requires two Slack tokens and reads the daemon connection from the same variables the other clients use:

  • SLACK_BOT_TOKEN — the Bot User OAuth token (xoxb-…). Required.
  • SLACK_APP_TOKEN — an app-level token with the connections:write scope (xapp-…), which is what enables Socket Mode. Required.
  • JOE_SERVER — the daemon base URL. Defaults to http://localhost:7777.
  • JOE_API_KEY — the bearer token used to authenticate to the daemon. Optional, but required in practice whenever the daemon enforces auth.

If either Slack token is missing, joe slack refuses to start and tells you which one.

Bring it up

Create a Slack app, enable Socket Mode, install it to your workspace to mint the bot token, and generate an app-level token with connections:write. Then:

export SLACK_BOT_TOKEN="xoxb-..."
export SLACK_APP_TOKEN="xapp-..."
export JOE_SERVER="http://localhost:7777"
export JOE_API_KEY="<service-account-key>"

joe slack

The process stays in the foreground holding the Socket Mode connection; stop it with SIGINT/SIGTERM. Run it alongside an already-running joe daemon — it depends on that daemon being reachable at JOE_SERVER.

Where to go next

The MCP serverThe knowledge graph