How to integrate internal APIs (Not accessible outside office network) to slack slash commands

Question

I am trying to use slash commands to my one of the slack channel. I tried to do a POC using git API and it worked fine.

I first created a slash command from this link : https://api.slack.com/censored/slash-commands

Commnad: /poc Request URL: http://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts

This worked fine when I type /opc on slack chat box of my channel. It returns some data.

But when I change the Request URL to an internal API, which is accessible only from the office domain, I get error:

Darn – that slash command didn't work (error message: Failure when receiving data from the peer). Manage the command at .

I believe, slack is not able to access my internal URL in case. Is that possible to see the slack logs?

Can anyone please help me here.

Answer 1

This can not work, since the request URL needs to be accessible from the public Internet in order to work with Slack.

In order to access internal APIs with Slack you will need some kind of gateway or tunnel through the firewall of your company that exposes the request URL to Slack. There are many ways how to do that and the solution needs to be designed according to the security policy of your company.

One approach would be to run your script for the slash command on an internal webserver (one that has access to the internal API) use a VPN tunnel to expose that web server to the Internet, e.g. with a tool like ngrok.