Slack::BlockKit

Almost any time you want to send content to Slack, and you want to end up in front of a human, you will want to use Block Kit. You can get away without using Block Kit if you're only sending plain text or "mrkdwn" text, but even then, the lack of an escaping mechanism in mrkdwn can be a problem.

The Block Kit system lets you build quite a few different pieces of presentation, but it's fiddly and the error reporting is terrible if you get something wrong. This library is meant to make it easy to write Block Kit content, and to provide client-side validation of constructed blocks with better (well, less awful) errors when you make a mistake.

The library you're most likely to want to use is Slack::BlockKit::Sugar, which exports a bunch of functions that can be combined to produce valid Block Kit structures. Each of those functions will produce an object, or maybe several. You shouldn't really need to build any of those objects by hand, but you can. To find more about the classes shipped with Slack::Block Kit, look at the docs for the Sugar library and follow the links from there.

For example, to produce something roughly equivalent to this Markdown:

Here is a *safe* link: **[click me](https://rjbs.cloud/)**
* it will be fun
* it will be cool 🙂
* it will be enough

You can write this code:

use Slack::BlockKit::Sugar -all => { -prefix => 'bk_' };

bk_blocks(
  bk_richblock(
    bk_richsection(
      "Here is a ", bk_italic("safe"), " link: ",
      bk_link("https://fastmail.com/", "click me", { style => { bold => 1 } }),
    ),
    bk_ulist(
      "it will be fun",
      bk_richsection("it will be cool", bk_emoji('smile')),
      "it will be enough",
    ),
  )
);