afk

For remote only teams, profile status on collaboration tools like slack is an important indicator of your availability, which means those statuses require a well-thought out approach, afk takes this small thing a bit too seriously!

Important

afk is experimental and has only been tested on a modern MacOS system. Please report issues.

Why?

• Support for multiple (slack) workspaces
  • No brainer for consultants! 👀
• No secrets management & Compliance friendly
  • afk is completely local. All secrets reamin locked in your system's keychain.
• The afk config file is dotfiles friendly
  • Build up as many status presets as you like!
  • The config is also privacy friendly, afk never exposes which workspace(s) you are a part of.
• Unified availability status
  • afk config club things like status, presence and dnd elements under one status preset config.

Why not?

• Initial friction while setting up the app (see setup) in workspaces you want to operate on.
• Possible disapproval by slack workspace admins.
  • Slack Admins can kick any app, I recommend not telling them in advance, if they find it, explain why you need it (check readme header).
• Slack Workspace App Limit
  • For FREE plan, slack has a limit of 10 apps, if you are in luck, you can setup afk. Although you can bypass this by creating your own free workspace.
  • For Pro/Enterprise plans, there's no limit. However, I recommend not talking about afk to your colleagues (imagine 100 afk-bots on a slack workspace 😬)

Install

Grab the binary from releases.

Setup

Slack

1. Go to Slack API Dashboard on a browser where you are logged in to any slack workspace.
2. Under Your App Configuration Tokens, click Generate Token. Assign the only available initial development workspace (don't worry about this).
3. Copy the Access Token (we'll need it later on).
4. Run afk --setup.
5. Provide the access token you just copied.
6. Follow on-screen instructions.

Enable Multi-Workspace Setup

1. In Slack App Dashboard, choose the automatically created "AFK" app and click Manage Distribution in the left sidebar.
2. Complete the Distribute App Checklist.
3. Under the section Share Your App with Other Workspaces, click Activate Public Distribution. Do not submit your app to the Slack Marketplace.
4. Re-run afk -s.

Usage

Going away

Note: you can build your own status presets, lunch below is just an example.

afk with custom expiration time, this will be automatically saved for future afk lunch invocations.

afk lunch 67m

Set lunch status, afk will read expiration default duration from your config

afk lunch

Back online

afk has a -c\--clear flag that can be used if you are back early or didn't set an expiration time earlier.

afk -c

Config

afk ships with some default presets, modify them to your liking by editing the config file:

• Linux/MacOS: .config/afk/config.toml
• Windows: C:\Users\<UserName>\AppData\Roaming\afk\config.toml