Question:

I am trying to implement simple slack bot. So I have configured hubot which will take inputs from slack and passing it to my webapp (django app) and it will take whatever the response from django-app and will reply to slack.

In this process I am trying to store session in django using request.session but that is not reflected in slack. If I am accessing the django-url in browser it is able to store sessions and getting proper response with session.

So does the problem lie with slack or my approach and is there a way to store sessions in hubot when requesting to django-app ??

I can not speak to the specific technologies you use (hubot, django), but I am using server sessions with my Slack apps all the time and can give you a general answer on how it works. Note that my Slack apps are build with PHP, but I think its safe to assume that the principles are the same.

<strong>Slack does not support sessions</strong>

In general Slack does not support sessions or context. Instead everything is request based. So if you want to have sessions to keep a functional context between requests you need to organize that by yourself in your Slack app.

<strong>Challenge for using server sessions with server requests</strong>

One challenge is that most server sessions are designed to work with a client that uses a browser. e.g. a PHP server session will store a cookie in the browser, so the server knows, which requests belong to the same session. This does obviously not work with Slack, since all Slack requests are coming from a server and and there is no browser involved.

<strong>Approach for using server sessions with Slack</strong>

But you can use severs session with Slack with these two tricks:

<em>Manually set the session ID</em>

Usually the ID of a session is chosen automatically by the server, but you can also set it manually. This allows you to tell the server to continue an existing session that was started with a previous request.

<em>Include session ID in Slack control</em>

The functional session of a user is tied together by the Slack controls he uses. (e.g. an interactive button). Its possible to include custom data in those controls (see <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/a/45971885/4379151" rel="nofollow">this answer</a> for details) and that allows you to include the current session ID in it.

<em>Full approach</em>

You include the ID of your current session in the Slack controls, that you create with your app (e.g. an interactive button). Once the user clicks a button Slack will send a request to your app, which will include the session ID. That allows your app to continue an already started server session.