Introducing Sign in with Slack

Slack API
Slack Platform Blog
4 min readMay 10, 2016

Today, we’re introducing Sign in with Slack, a way for customers to quickly sign up for your app using their Slack identity. More than just log in, Sign in with Slack keeps teams connected across the many apps they use for work.

Sign in with Slack

When a user signs up for your app using Sign in with Slack, they’ll be instantly connected to their teammates within your product. For customers, this is an invisible but delightful feature. It exemplifies our mission in action — making people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive — by keeping teams effortlessly in sync.

Developer Benefits

With Sign in with Slack, you can whitelist an entire Slack team as a group of new users, which eases billing and IT administration and improves end-user experience. On top of that, Sign in with Slack has some other handy advantages:

  • It’s fast: sign up users for your app quickly by allowing them to use their existing Slack login and profile information.
  • It’s simple: add sign in with Slack in 3 steps. Enrich your app experience with Slack team and user information.
  • It’s secure: we’ll handle managing SSO providers and two-factor authentication, you just implement standard OAuth.

How to Use Sign in with Slack

Integrating Sign in with Slack with your app should feel familiar because it uses OAuth 2.0, just like the rest of the Slack platform. We’ve created a new set of OAuth scopes that let you choose which bits of user and team information are needed to sign in to your app.

  • identity.basic: request access to basic identifying information about the user and their team
  • identity.email: request access to the user’s email address
  • identity.avatar: request access to the user’s profile image
  • identity.team: request access to the user’s team name, domain, and icon image
Authenticating

Once someone’s completed the OAuth flow, all you need to do is call the users.identity method, and you’ll get all of the bits you requested for that team and user.

{
“ok”: true,
“team”: {
“domain”: “kingsguard”,
“id”: “T03PKGL8S”,
“image_102”: “https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/slack-files2/avatars/2016-05-09/41285962049_0c623216c7e408139013_102.jpg",
“image_132”: “https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/slack-files2/avatars/2016-05-09/41285962049_0c623216c7e408139013_132.jpg",
…,
“name”: “Kingsguard”
},
“user”: {
“email”: “swordofthemorning@kingslanding.net”,
“id”: “U03PKGLEE”,
“name”: “Arthur Dayne”
}
}

Partners Using Sign in with Slack

Here are a few examples of companies using Sign in with Slack today.

Quip

Quip’s brand new Slack app, equipped with Sign in with Slack, is launching today. Sign in with Slack can be found right on their home page.

Quip Homepage

Upon signing in with Slack you are automatically connected to your Slack team within Quip. No extra team creation required — your team already exists within Quip in one fell swoop. From there, you can use Slack and Quip to supercharge the way that you brainstorm and create documents with your team.

Stay connected to your team

Figma

The team at Figma also uses Sign in with Slack to onboard new customers and connect them with their teammates within Figma.

Figma Sign In
Slack Identity Authorization

Since Figma is a collaborative design product, staying connected to your team is critical. Upon signing in with Slack, Figma groups you with your Slack teammates so that you can get straight to work on files shared among your team.

Connected to Team in Figma

We have four other apps using Sign in with Slack today that you can check out: Kifi, OfficeVibe, Slackline and Smooz.

To get started

Whether you’re already a Slack developer or just getting started, adding Sign in with Slack to your app is simple. Follow our walkthrough, and your customers will be on their way to a more pleasant sign in experience in no time. We’re always happy to hear your feedback. If you have any questions or suggestions for improvement, please write in or tweet @SlackAPI.

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