How can I color part of Slack incoming-webhook messages?

guldam picture guldam · Feb 15, 2017 · Viewed 24.2k times · Source

I want to compose a python script which sends a color-formatted message to a configured slack channel. I managed to send sentences of plain texts to slack channels but I could not figure out how to confer part of the sentences colors that I want.

I used slackweb library in python as below

import slackweb
slack = slackweb.Slack(url = url_of_the_configured_channel)
string_to_send = "test TEST"
payload = {'text' : string_to_send}
slack.notify(text=string_to_send)

how can I, say, format string_to_send or payload so that the word 'test' appears blue and 'TEST' appears red in the slack channel?

Thanks in advance.

Answer

Erik Kalkoken picture Erik Kalkoken · Feb 15, 2017

Unfortunately it is at the moment not possible to color text of a Slack message with the API. You can use different styles, e.g. bold and italic, but not colors. (See Message Formatting in Slack documentation on how to use styles.)

You can use colors for your attachments. That will however result in a vertical color bar marker for the whole attachment, but not in colored text. (See Attachment Parameters in Slack documentation on how to color your attachments.)

Here is an example on how to use colors for Slack attachments (taken from the Slack documentation):

{
    "attachments": [
        {
            "fallback": "New ticket from Andrea Lee - Ticket #1943: Can't rest my password - https://groove.hq/path/to/ticket/1943",
            "pretext": "New ticket from Andrea Lee",
            "title": "Ticket #1943: Can't reset my password",
            "title_link": "https://groove.hq/path/to/ticket/1943",
            "text": "Help! I tried to reset my password but nothing happened!",
            "color": "#7CD197"
        }
    ]
}