Slack, along with Microsoft Teams, is one of the biggest (if not the biggest) messaging app for professional use. With millions of users and thousands of tightly integrated apps, it is also a pretty common target for text message (SMS) forwarding.
This post is a step-by-step walkthrough so you can set up your own slack channel and forward your text messages to it.
Table of Contents
Prerequisites
Before we dive into the specifics, it might help to familiarize yourself with the basic setup as well as the e-mail forwarding function of AutoForward SMS.
To successfully complete this tutorial, we need the following
- The AutoForward SMS app for Android installed on your phone
- An account with slack (so you have a channel to send to)
Create Slack App
The first stop is to open your slack channels admin view, and then go to Your Apps. You will find a green Create New App button in the top right corner.
Click that button, and you should see a dialog pop up. Pick a good name for your app, and hit Create App.
Configure Incoming Webhooks
An incoming webhook represents a publicly accessible URL that you can use to communicate with your app (and ultimately a channel). To set up such an endpoint, we need to find the Incoming Webhook menu item in the Settings section of the newly created app.
First, toggle the Activate Incoming Webhooks to On, after that, click Add New Webhook to Workspace.
A new dialog, asking for where to post to, will come up. Select your channel of choice, then click Allow.
After clicking Allow, we are done with the configuration side as far as Slack is concerned.
Testing Slack Integration
Now that the configuration is done, we can move on to testing. This is best done on your laptop/desktop computer. You can either use CURL (as suggested by Slack) or use a Chrome extension called Postman (like we did).
To get started, open up Postman and keep a copy of the Webhook URL in your clipboard.
- Change the HTTP method from GET to POST
- Paste the URL where it says Enter request URL
- Use {“message”: “Hello World!”} as your payload.
Use jsonlint.com to ensure that your JSON payloads are formatted correctly.
PRO TIP
🎉Showtime!🎉
- Hit Send and (hopefully) enjoy a Slack message being posted to your channel.
App Setup
From this point on, setting up the app is super simple. Head over to our URL/API forwarding blog post and simply use the endpoint that you copied from your Slack dashbord.
Make sure to also use POST as the HTTP method and that you correctly format the payload (as shown above). Once the app is configured, send yourself a text message (SMS) and see it being forwarded to your channel.
Photo by Scott Webb from Pexels