Bridge Slack to your workspace

What you will build

By the end of this tutorial, you will have:

• A Slack app created for your workspace, with the right permissions and events already set
• A live connection between Slack and Control Center
• Your own Slack account linked to your Control Center user
• An agent answering you in a Slack thread and a ticket filed from a slash command

Prerequisites:

• Your first workspace and Dispatch your first agent completed — a workspace with no agents can receive a Slack message but has nobody to answer it
• The workspace’s CEO agent has an adapter and a model set at Settings → Workspace → Agents. The bridge wakes the CEO, not the agent you configured in the previous tutorial and an agent with no adapter is dispatched to the pi CLI.
• The owner or admin role in the Control Center workspace (connecting a chat app speaks for the whole workspace)
• Permission to create and install apps in your Slack workspace

Nothing here needs a public address, a tunnel, or an inbound port. Control Center dials out to Slack over Socket Mode, so this works from a laptop behind NAT.

Step 1: Get a Slack app configuration token

This is the one secret you have to fetch by hand. It lets Control Center create and later edit the app for you.

1. Open api.slack.com/apps
2. Scroll to the app configuration tokens section at the bottom of the page
3. Generate a token pair for your Slack workspace
4. Copy the refresh token — it starts with xoxe-

Step 2: Let Control Center create the app

1. In Control Center, go to Settings → Workspace → General and find the Chat bridges card
2. On the Slack block, click Create app for me
3. Paste the app configuration token
4. Review what the bot will look like:
   • App name: how Slack lists the app, e.g. Control Center · Acme
   • Bot name: what people type after @, e.g. control-center
   • Short description and What the bot says it can do
   • Slash command: cc by default, so the command is /cc
   • Direct messages: leave on so members can DM the bot
5. Click Create app

Control Center composes the whole app definition — Socket Mode on, the bot scopes and event subscriptions it needs, the slash command, the Messages tab — and creates it in Slack.

Step 3: Finish the two steps only Slack can do

Slack has no API for generating an app-level token or installing an app, so the dialog hands you both as links:

1. Generate an app-level token — opens Basic Information → App-Level Tokens. Create a token with the connections:write scope and copy it. It starts with xapp-
2. Install the app — opens Install App. Install to your workspace, then copy the Bot User OAuth Token. It starts with xoxb-

Keep both values around for the next step.

Step 4: Connect

1. Back in the dialog, click Paste the credentials
2. Enter the Bot token (xoxb-…) and the App-level token (xapp-…)
3. Leave App configuration token empty — the one from step 1 was already stored (Slack rotated it and Control Center saved the new one)
4. Click Connect

Control Center verifies the bot token with Slack before it stores anything, then opens the socket. The row now reads the bot’s name and your Slack workspace name with a Live tag.

Step 5: Link your own Slack account

The connection makes the bot reachable; linking makes you recognizable. Until your Slack identity is linked, the bot will not act on your messages — it never attributes a message to whoever installed the app.

Linking is personal, so it lives on a different page from the workspace-wide connection.

1. Go to Settings → You → Profile & identity and find the Linked chat accounts card
2. Click Link my Slack account
3. Copy the command it shows, for example /cc link K7M2QP
4. In Slack, send that command to the bot in a DM
5. The bot answers “Linked — you are …”

The code is single-use and expires in 15 minutes. If your Slack email matches a Control Center user who is already a member of this workspace, the bridge links you automatically the first time you talk to it and you can skip this step.

If you mention the bot before this is done, it refuses and says why. The three refusals are distinct, so read which one you got:

• Unlinked sender: the bot tells you how to link. Its message still names an older settings path — use the one above. Come back to this step.
• Linked, but not a member of this workspace: ask an admin to invite you.
• Member with a read-only role (viewer or guest): the bot will not start work on your behalf.

Step 6: Put an agent on something

1. In Slack, invite the bot into a channel: /invite @control-center

2. Mention it with a real request:

   @control-center summarize the open PRs on the api repo

The bridge:

1. Creates a Control Center channel for that Slack thread, named after the channel and your request
2. Wakes the workspace’s front-door agent (the CEO agent when there is one, otherwise the first agent)
3. Streams the agent’s answer back into the Slack thread as it is written

Reply in the same thread to keep going — no further mentions needed, because the thread is now bridged. Or DM the bot instead of using a channel; each DM conversation drives its own Control Center channel, with a title and an “is thinking…” status line while the agent works.

Streaming needs Slack’s streaming API, which not every plan has. If your app is refused it, the bridge stops trying for the whole connection and posts each reply as a single message instead and the Chat bridges card reads “Live streaming is off for this Slack app”. Everything else works the same.

Step 7: File a ticket without leaving Slack

/cc ticket Fix the flaky login test | It fails on CI about once a day.

The bot answers with the ticket key it filed. The ticket is an ordinary local Control Center ticket, reported by you, ready to be assigned to an agent. /cc help lists everything the command can do.

Recap

You created a Slack app from Control Center, connected it over an outbound socket, linked your Slack identity to your Control Center user and drove an agent from a Slack thread. Everything that happened in Slack also exists in Control Center: the thread is a channel, the reply is a transcript, the ticket is a ticket.

Next: Set up Slack integration covers the by-hand path, rotating tokens and troubleshooting. For the model underneath, read Chat bridges.