Plugin Settings

All settings that are defined, either from the Slack Machine defaults or in local_settings.py are available to plugins through the self.settings field. This is a dictionary with all settings indexed by their name. Next to local_settings.py, users can also specify settings with environment variables. Slack Machine will automatically translate any environment variable with the format SM_<SETTING_NAME> to a setting with name SETTING_NAME, overriding a setting with the same name from local_settings.py or the default settings.

So an environment variable SM_SLACK_APP_TOKEN will result in a setting SLACK_APP_TOKEN.

Setting names are case insensitive.

Example of using settings

When the local_settings.py looks like this:

SLACK_APP_TOKEN = "xapp-my-app-token"
SLACK_BOT_TOKEN = "xoxb-my-bot-token"
GREETING_PLUGIN_MY_GREETING = "Bonjour"

This can be used in a plugin, like this:

@respond_to(r"Hello!")
async def greeting(self, msg):
    await msg.reply(f"{self.settings['GREETING_PLUGIN_MY_GREETING']}, {msg.at_sender}!")

The response to a message @superbot Hello! from @john, in this case would be: Bonjour, @john!

Required settings

If your plugin requires one or more settings to be defined in order to work, you can mark them as required with the @required_settings decorator. This decorator takes a string or a list of strings as argument which can be one or more settings that are required by your plugin. Upon startup, Slack Machine will check if any of the settings that are marked as required by a plugin, have not been defined by the user. If it finds one or more missing settings, it will not load that particular plugin, and notify the user which settings are missing.

The @required_settings decorator can be applied to a plugin class and/or its methods. Note that if any of the required settings are missing, the plugin will not load as a whole, so none of the methods will be registered.

Example:

@required_settings(["TODO_SERVICE_USERNAME", "TODO_SERVICE_PASSWORD"])
class TodoPlugin(MachineBasePlugin):
    ...