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What Slack permissions and access scopes do you require?
What Slack permissions and access scopes do you require?
Pete Hamilton avatar
Written by Pete Hamilton
Updated this week

As a workspace app, you can interact with incident.io from anywhere within Slack, but we’re careful with the permissions and scopes we require and request the minimum we need to function.

Required scopes on installation

All of the following scopes are requested on first installation of our Slack bot, and are required for our app to run.

  • app_mentions:read to respond to direct mentions to our bot from Slack users

  • bookmarks:read to see the bookmarks we set within incident channels

  • bookmarks:write to set bookmarks in incident channels (such as the alert that triggered the incident)

  • channels:history - to read content in Slack channels we're added to, including messages users pin in their incident channel

  • channels:manage - to create incident channels

  • channels-read - to read incident channel names

  • chat:write - to write messages and updates in channels we have access to

  • chat:write.public to send announcements to public channels we haven't been added to (such as the incident announcement channel)

  • commands to add slash commands, such as /inc so you can interact with our bot

  • files:read to read files shared in channels we have access to (such as images in incident channels)

  • groups:read to see private incident channels we are part of

  • groups:write to post to private incident channels we are part of

  • groups:history to read messages in private incident channels we're added to

  • im:history to read DMs that are sent to the incident bot

  • links:read to view URLs in messages

  • links:write to show previews of URLs in messages from our bot

  • pins:read to read pinned messages so we can save them to the incident timeline

  • pins:write to write new pins to a Slack channel, such as the incident welcome message

  • reactions:read to see when users have reacted to messages to trigger an action such as creating followups with ⏩

  • reactions:write to add reactions to messages, such as marking GitHub pull requests as reviewed ✅

  • teams:read to read your organisations name and icon

  • users:read to read your organisations users

  • users:read.email to match user accounts with other services, such as GitHub

  • users.profile:read to read user avatars so they can be displayed in our UI

  • usergroups:read to list all user groups for syncing schedules

  • usergroups:write to sync On-call schedules into your Slack user groups

Optional additional scopes

We don't request any of these on installation, but you can choose to provide them later

  • channels:join - to rejoin incident or announcement channels if we lose access. If this isn't granted, users will have to manually add our bot to any channel they want to interact with us in. If you'd like to configure this, chat to us.

Privileged access scopes

Depending on your Slack workspace settings, bots and regular users may be restricted from taking certain actions. If your organisation's Slack configuration requires admin access for certain operations, you can choose to additionally provide these scopes, otherwise some incident.io features may be degraded.

These scopes are User Scopes, which means you're granting us permission to use them on behalf of a specific user, rather than as our bot.

To use any of these, you need to configure a Slack admin for our bot

These include:

  • channels:write to create and archive public incident channels, if this requires admin access in your Slack workspace

  • groups:write to create and archive private incident channels, and remove member's access to them if it's revoked within incident.io

  • usergroups:write to sync On-call schedules into your Slack user groups, if this requires admin access in your Slack workspace

  • admin.conversations:write to convert channels between public and private, to match the visibility of an incident.

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