slack deploy does not appear to be deploying my app

[josephbr7]

Question

When I deploy my deno app using 'slack deploy' I get all the standard messages regarding "App packaged and ready to deploy" and "{app_name} deployed in 3.6s" etc. But when I test my workflow to verify my change has made it through, I notice that nothing happens. In my specific case, I've changed some of the text inside one of the workflow fields but I see no such change.

Version

slack version 0.15.2

OS Info

Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 22.04.5 LTS
Release: 22.04
Codename: jammy
#36~22.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jul 1 03:54:01 UTC 2025

Steps to reproduce:

1.slack deploy (make sure you deploy the app to the correct workspace if you have multiple)
2. open the workflow in app
3. note that it has not changed since last code change

Expected result:

I would expect the workflow to match the code I wrote for it.

Actual result:

Workflow behaves as if no code change was made.

Requirements

• [*] I've read and understood the Contributing guidelines and have done my best effort to follow them.
• [*] I've read and agree to the Code of Conduct.
• [*] I've searched for any related issues and avoided creating a duplicate issue.

[josephbr7]

I have just updated to version 3.7.0 and still the same issue.

I've also noticed that It pretends to deploy even when my code has errors in it such as a title for a workflow exceeding 24 characters long, if I attempt to deploy to a new workspace I'll get the error about title length, but attempting to deploy to a workspace with an older version of the bot does not trigger such an error.

[WilliamBergamin]

Hi @josephbr7 thanks for reporting this 💯

Since this behavior only shows up with your "older" application I suspect this may be a backend issue 🤔
Once your app is deployed and you try triggering the workflow are you seeing any activity logs through the slack activity command?
What version of deno are you using locally when running the slack deploy command?

[josephbr7]

deno 2.2.11
v8 13.5.212.10-rusty
typescript 5.7.3

Could try updating these as well.

slack activity does show that the workflows are being started when I open them. But deploying a modified version does not seem to update the workflow, regardless of if the change is erroneous or not.

edit upgrading deno to 2.5.1 hasn't fixed the issue.

[josephbr7]

I have a temporary workaround where I get my admins of the workspace to delete my app, then I get one chance to deploy the app, if I need any more changes I must request the app to be deleted and deploy from scratch again.

[WilliamBergamin]

This seems like a a potential server side issue I would recommend reaching out to support@slack.com

[josephbr7]

After contacting Slack support and going through a couple of things. It turns out that my deno.jsonc file was old and had listed old versions of the deno_slack_sdk and deno_slack_api.

I suppose then that to prevent this kind of confusion in the future, at the very least, add a generic "verify deno_slack_api and deno_slack_sdk versions are up to date in your deno.jsonc" message on failure. Somewhat like how it tells you to run slack doctor if something goes wrong.

There are better solutions then a generic error message, but require some amount of work and may or may not be possible depending on how the cli is coded (I have no knowledge of the internals of this product). An example of a better solution could be that whatever code that reads the deno.jsonc file could put warnings if the versions used are considered 'old'.

[zimeg]

👋 Hey @josephbr7! Thanks so much for following up on this issue with these findings!

It's not so clear why a reinstallation might've been erroring, but I'm curious if the doctor command was showing these packages had an available update while troubleshooting?

    ✔ Dependencies (requisites for development)
        deno_slack_hooks: 1.3.2 → 1.4.0 (update available)
        deno_slack_sdk: 2.15.0 → 2.15.1 (update available)
        deno_slack_api: 2.8.0

We might want to investigate the check-update hook for possible issues if not... I agree that current remediations can be improved but I'm hoping we can start with this!

[josephbr7]

I've got my chat logs with slack support. When I was asked to send them the results of slack doctor and the bug was still occurring. The dependencies section for slack doctor was empty!

    ✔ Runtime (foundations for the application)
        deno: 2.3.5
        typescript: 5.8.3
        v8: 13.7.152.6-rusty

    ✔ Dependencies (requisites for development)

Errors: 0

The Dependencies section is still empty after the fix was applied on both my Windows machine and my Ubuntu VM, if that matters.

Hope that helps!

[zimeg]

@josephbr7 Is it possible to send the contents of either a .hooks/slack.json or slack.json file from your project?

I'm not sure I've seen this before! The supported version of hooks used in this project might've changed without us realizing until now for the doctor command? I would hope some message was surfaced, but these errors might be logged to outputs when using the --verbose flag instead...