PyBites: Flask API part 2 - Building a Deep Work Logger with Flask, Slack and Go ...

AfterSimple API - part 1 a more practical app in this part 2 tutorial: a Deep Work logger integrating Google docs and Slack, including deployment of the app to Heroku.

Sometimes you come across an article you think: "I definitely need to play with this!", enter Google Spreadsheets and python .

I decided to make a Flask app to log the amount of deep work. Why? Read the book , in short: it is a powerful success habit.

So we have the API = Flask, the back-end = Google Docs. What about the interface?

I wanted something for both laptop and mobile = Slack. Enter the Slack API / Slash Commands . I defined this super basic interface:

/dw <time> (<activity>) - /dw is the slack command - time can be an int (hour) or more specifically hh:mm - activity is optional, if not provided it defaults to the name of the channel Step by step

Here is roughly what I did. I document it here so you can start building something similar to scratch your own itch. The code so far is here .

To be able to write to a Google Doc follow Google Spreadsheets and Python to create an app via the Google API and obtain the client_secret.json file.

pip install flask and pygsheets, implement GET and POST, again more details here . I used Flask's HTTP Basic Auth snippet to protect the GET. For the POST I verify the Slack token. As good practice I stored user/pw in (OS) env variables. I defined some helpers in backend.py .

Deploy the app to Heroku, I was so glad I took notes some time ago (section "Deployment to Heroku"), summary:

$ heroku login $ heroku create <appname> $ pip freeze > requirements.txt $ echo "web: gunicorn api:app" > Procfile $ echo "python-3.5.2" > runtime.txt $ heroku config:set SLACK_DW_CMD_TOKEN=xyz $ heroku config:set SLACK_DW_USER=xyz $ heroku config:set SLACK_DW_PW=xyz $ git push heroku master # see note next section $ heroku run python manage.py deploy Deploying an app is a challenge in itself. For example how do you get the client_secret.json file in Heroku? I had to go with this (not ideal) workaround . # put client_secret.json in .gitignore on master # commit it to secret-branch you keep between localhost and Heroku (not Github) ... $ git push heroku secret-branch:master

Create a Slack app , then a Slash Command where I defined:

Command: /dw URL = API endpoint on Heroku Method = POST Token = generated, I put that in env variable SLACK_DW_CMD_TOKEN above You can set an Autocomplete help text which is useful to your team

This is the payload Slack sends to your API for consumption:

token=xyz team_id=T0001 team_domain=example channel_id=C123 channel_name=deepwork user_id=U123 user_name=bbelderbos -> cool: the app can be used by the whole team on Slack command=/dw text=your_entered_text response_url=https://hooks.slack.com/commands/1234/5678

See the parsing of it in the post_entry method.

Result

Lessons learned

Scratch your own itch. This was a nice exercise to integrate with apps I often use. The whole integration thing taught me a lot mainly because I got stuck and had to debug.

For example Slack does not seem to use JSON so in my Flask I had to change request.json to request.form, using ngrok speeded up the debugging.

I lost quite some time struggling with gspread (used in the mentioned Twilio article) which was way too slow (2 min for a POST request?!), using pygsheets response times went down to 1-2 seconds or less which made Slack, Heroku and me happy. Lesson: fail fast and small, compare different libraries, and obviously read article comments first before trying!

Keep Calm and Code in Python!

-- Bob