What is the best way for a team to collaborate on a slack bolt app?

[joaohenriquesfr]

Question

Hello, I'm currently working on a slack app using boltjs (multiworkspace and http events, not in socket mode), I did not use slack cli or started from a template. I'm in the process of making a get started readme that would allow another developper to get the app up and running quickly. So far it seemed to require creating the app from manifest on slack dev dashboard. I then took a dive into slack cli and I'm trying to see if it could accelerate the dev workflow, the two biggest things I'm trying to improve are:

1. Allowing a dev to get the app running as quickly as possible on his machine
2. Possibly setting up a sandbox environment

Thanks for your help

Version

3.12

OS Info

Please paste the output from:

ProductName: macOS
ProductVersion: 15.5
BuildVersion: 24F74
Darwin Kernel Version 24.5.0: Tue Apr 22 19:53:27 PDT 2025; root:xnu-11417.121.6~2/RELEASE_ARM64_T6041

Steps to reproduce:

Expected result:

Actual result:

Requirements

• I've read and understood the Contributing guidelines and have done my best effort to follow them.
• I've read and agree to the Code of Conduct.
• I've searched for any related issues and avoided creating a duplicate issue.

[WilliamBergamin]

Hi @joaohenriquesfr thanks for writing in 💯

We don't have official best practice on how to collaborate on building slack apps, I can share some top of mind advice from what I've observed

• This might be obvious for most but creating a Slack app for "production" and not use it to develop or test prevents many bugs
• If you plan on developing different features in parallel, you won't be able to use the same "development" app between developers because events will be randomly sent between each instance of the app
  • It might be easier to set up each developer with a Sandbox and their own "development" version of the app
• Using the CLI in combination with manifest.json allows to
  • Commit/fetch the app configuration from git
  • Run, manage, install, and delete Slack apps locally, this makes it easy to clone, create and run development apps
  • Spot potentially differences between the "production" and "development" app configurations

There are many valid ways to set up projects for collaborative work, starting simple and improving the process incrementally over time can prevent over engineering it.

Hope you find this helpful! if you settle on a good process feel free to share it here so that others can get inspired 🙏