Send WeatherX alerts to Slack

This one is a single click. The button in your email sends you to Slack's own screen; Slack asks which channel; Slack hands us an address that posts into it. Every alert we send goes to that address and nowhere else. We never read anything: not your messages, not your files, not who is in the workspace.

What Slack is asked for

The approval screen names these. It is the complete list, and it is read from the same setting the screen itself is built from:

• incoming-webhook — post into the one channel you pick, and nowhere else. This is the one we use for every alert.
• chat:write — post as WeatherX in a channel this app has been added to. We do not use this today — every alert goes to the address above. We ask for it now so that a later feature does not need you to approve WeatherX a second time.

None of them lets us READ anything. We cannot see your messages, your files or who is in the workspace, and we never ask for a permission that would let us.

What you will see on Slack's screen

If you belong to more than one Slack workspace, check the name at the top right before you press Allow — that is the workspace the alerts will land in.

The steps

1. Press Connect Slack in the WeatherX email.

2. Sign in if Slack asks, and check the workspace name at the top right.

3. Pick the channel the alerts should go to. A channel your crew already watches beats a new one nobody opens.

4. Press Allow.

5. Slack sends you back to a WeatherX page that says the place is connected. That page is the confirmation — there is nothing else to fill in.

If you closed the window

Nothing was connected, and nothing was spent. The link works once and lasts seven days, so if the connection never finished at Slack's end, press the button in your email again.

If the link is older than seven days, or you already used it, it will say the link is not found. Write to support@weatherx.earth and ask for a new link — we send one in a minute.

What arrives, and when

We look at your place every ten minutes. You get one message when weather is coming or has started, and one when it has passed. A quiet week is a quiet channel — nothing arrives to say that nothing is happening.

The first line is the decision: STOP means it is at the place now or within twenty minutes, PREPARE means it is coming, ALL CLEAR means it has passed.

The last line of every message points back at this page. It is a link to a manual and not a switch: opening it changes nothing, so an alert that is forwarded, quoted or read by a spam filter carries nothing anybody can act on.

What changes on our side

• The place named in your email gets one destination: the Slack channel you picked.
• Alerts for that place go there from the next ten-minute cycle. Nothing else about your account moves.
• Your API key is not touched. It never travels in any of these links.
• You can have more than one destination on a place. Add another and both receive every alert.

How to stop it

Remove the WeatherX app in Slack, and the address stops working at once. Then take the destination off our side too — below — so we stop sending to a channel that no longer accepts it.

How to stop everything, without asking anybody

Your WeatherX email carries a Stop link at the bottom. Open it, and press the button on the page it shows. It stops every alert for that place and turns off every destination on it, at any hour. It needs no key and no reply.

Write to support@weatherx.earth, and ask us to take one destination off and leave the rest running.

Everything here needs your API key

Send it as an X-API-Key header. It is the key from your welcome message, and it never travels in a connect link — the two are separate on purpose.

Send yourself a real alert, now

You do not have to wait for weather. One call sends a real alert through the real senders:

POST /portal/sites/<place id>/test
X-API-Key: wx_live_…

It arrives as light rain half an hour away, and it says on its face that it is a test — in the first line of the message — so nobody can mistake it for weather. One a minute, twenty a day.

Take one destination off, and leave the rest

The Stop link above turns off everything at once. This takes off one and leaves the place watched. Ask for the list, then delete the one you mean:

GET /portal/sites/<place id>/channels
DELETE /portal/channels/<id>
X-API-Key: wx_live_…

Everything else on that place carries on receiving.

Ask for a fresh connect link

If the Slack link has been used, or is older than seven days, or the message it came in was deleted, mint another:

POST /portal/sites/<place id>/connect/slack
X-API-Key: wx_live_…

{"kind": "slack", "url": "https://…", "expires_at": "…"}

Open the url in a browser and it behaves exactly like the button in your message — the key stays in the header and never travels in the link. Asking again for the same place and the same destination replaces the live link rather than adding a second one, so the newest one you were given is the one that works.

The message as fields, not sentences

This destination receives the alert written out as sentences, because a person reads it. A program usually wants the numbers instead — how far away, which direction, how far ahead the forecast was. That is a second destination kind, and it has its own page: alerts to your own server. A place can carry both at once.