Slack with Pidgin via slack-libpurple

Slack disabled support for XMPP in May 2018 and became yet another closed ecosystem. If you wish to still access it via 3rd party pidgin client, slack-libpurple is one available plugin to do so. Here lies some basic instructions on how to do so on Linux, which is Ubuntu 16 at the time of writing.

• https://github.com/dylex/slack-libpurple
• https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connect-to-Slack-over-IRC-and-XMPP

Install required packages

apt-get install build-essential git libpurple-dev pkg-config

Download, compile, install. Doing so as my user, hence make install-user

cd /tmp/
git clone https://github.com/dylex/slack-libpurple
cd slack-libpurple
make
make install-user

This plugin requires an API token for auth. Go here and create one, it should be 70ish characters long:

• https://api.slack.com/custom-integrations/legacy-tokens

Finally, open Pidgin, go to Accounts-> Manage-> Add

Basic tab:

• Protocol: Slack
• Username: <your slack username>
• Host: yourworkspace.slack.com

Advanced tab:

• API Token: <xoxp-blahhhhhasdfas1231241niner>
• I checked all other options (Open chat on message, Retrieve history, Download Avatars) and they seem to work fine.