title: Bring your own Slack app description: Run gild fully serverless by creating your own Slack app and pasting tokens. order: 4

Bring your own Slack app

If you'd rather not use the shared gild Slack app, gild supports a fully serverless, privacy-first mode: create your own Slack app and paste the tokens. The gild website is never involved, and no secret ever leaves your machine.

Create the Slack app

  1. Go to the Slack API dashboard and create a new app from scratch.
  2. Add the bot scopes gild needs: channels:read, channels:manage, groups:read, groups:write, channels:history, groups:history, chat:write, files:read, files:write, users:read, reactions:read, metadata.message:read.
  3. Add the user scopes for acting in private channels: channels:write, groups:write, channels:history.
  4. Enable Socket Mode and create an app-level token with connections:write.
  5. Subscribe to the events gild listens for: message.channels, message.groups, member_joined_channel, reaction_added, file_shared.

Paste your tokens

Install the app to your workspace, then in gild choose Bring your own Slack app and paste:

  • the bot token (xoxb-…)
  • the user token (xoxp-…)
  • the app-level token (xapp-…) for Socket Mode

gild stores these in your OS keyring. The same Slack adapter powers both modes, so you get the identical experience — just without the hosted OAuth callback.