We can all indisputably agree on that the three best things on 🌎 are warm blankets, emojis, and Slack. And when I discovered that I could add my own custom emojis into Slack, it was arguably one of the 🎉 😍 moments of my short-lived life (barely exceeding a close number two, when I discovered this warm blanket). So I built emojipacks, a command line interface, to bulk upload emojis into Slack. Let's take a 👀 at the code that accomplishes this ✨🌟✨🌟 feat.

👶 The Beginning

Shortly after I discovered the ability to add custom emojis in Slack, I was hooked like a 🐟 . I 🍩 even remember taking a break until the first 💯 emojis were added. But 🚢 emoji after emoji inevitably ate away at my entire day at work. Though I managed to enter a rhythm of 🔦 for emojis and then uploading them all at once, it still took a long ⌚️. I had to 🚧 off ⌛ ️on my 📅 just so I was able to have uninterrupted time dedicated to uploading emojis. Not the most glamorous of jobs, but somebody had to do it 🙌 💪 .

Knowing that Slack is active on Twitter (they even have a @SlackLovesTweets account that just RT's awesome tweets), I decided to 🚀 this tweet:

They gave me a 💬, but with 💩 😞 📰:

So they have a 👔💼 to 🏃 and maybe there are way more important things on their product road map 🙊. Maybe.

Fortunately for me, the Internet is made of a series of tubes, so there is definitely a way to hack together a solution to accomplish this.

💥 Emoji Packs

A few, long 🌑 🌓 🌕 🌗 🌚 of ✋ uploading one-off emojis pass. Until one 🌞, I came across this awesome project on Hacker News and was reinspired to 🔨🔧 something to bulk upload emojis.

Slackporter allows you to transfer emojis from one Slack account to another. Super neat. Plus the developer is responsive on Twitter (super nice guy, too)!

I decided to re-use these 🔑 pieces: ✊ the user login information, logging in, and submitting the emoji form. I also re-wrote it with Koa and generators. The result is emojipacks!

🔩 How this works

The script uses Cheerio for server-side HTML parsing and manipulation and Request to submit form requests.

The first step is to get to this 💻:

Then, the script grabs some 👻 form data, such as the sign in value, redirect path, and a unique session crumb. This 🔮 is used later to log into Slack.

With the form data, we can login to Slack:

Note that this won't ever load, since it is a static HTML file.

After doing so, we can go to the emoji upload page:

Here, we grab an upload crumb from an input field. We'll use this crumb when programmatically submitting the form submit request.

🔍 Debugging

To help me understand which HTML page the script was on, I 📝 the Cheerio-generated HTML to `'./test/<title>.html'` files. Then I could open it up and see where I ended up in the upload emoji flow.

For example, I would get the HTML on the server, parse it with Cheerio, then ️💾 it to a 🏡 📁:

var res = yield request(load);
var $ = cheerio.load(res[0].body);
write($('title').text(), $.html());

The function `write` is defined as:

function(title, html) {
  var test = resolve(__dirname, '../test/' + title + '.html');
  fs.writeFileSync(test, html);
};

After 🏃 the script, I can go into the `./test` directory, use this nifty dotfile command `server`* to spin up a local server in that directory, and check it out with my browser.

  🍉 🍉 🍉  emojipacks-cli (master): cd test
  🍉 🍉 🍉  test (master): server
Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 4000 ...
127.0.0.1 - - [25/Jul/2015 08:26:38] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 -
127.0.0.1 - - [25/Jul/2015 08:26:40] "GET /Slack.html HTTP/1.1" 200 -

Then you can browse to see where the script was able to navigate.

*The super convenient `server` command is taken from my mate Anthony's dotfiles.

🚀 Next

So there you have it. The only thing next is to make more emoji 📦🎁 and try to find the upper limit in the number of custom emojis you can have in Slack.

🌊 you doing today? If you would like to contribute, please suggest an emoji pack!

Source. Demo.