BlockSlackbot

BlockSlackbot is a Rack middleware that blocks Slack crawlers which don't honor robots.txt files. It does so by identifiying the crawler by it's user agent string as defined in Slack's API documentation.

By default, BlockSlackbot will return with a 403 http status code and a body Bad Robot.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'block_slackbot'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install block_slackbot

In your rackup file:

# config.ru

require 'rack/block_slackbot'
use Rack::BlockSlackbot

In a Sinatra app:

# my_app.rb

require 'rack/block_slackbot'
class MyApp < Sinatra::Base
  configure do
    use Rack::BlockSlackbot

To change the blocking response, provide a Rack response array as an option like this:

# Redirect somewhere:
use Rack::BlockSlackbot, :response => [302, { "Location" => "https://example.com" }, []]

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/[USERNAME]/block_slackbot. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.