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Using TypeScript

This project is mostly written and built using TypeScript, which means many of the APIs have type information metadata 🎉. If you're using a code editor like VSCode, Atom, or many others that know how to read that metadata, or if you're using TypeScript in your own project, you'll benefit from improved documentation as your write code, early detection of errors, easier refactoring, and more.

This page helps describe how to use this package from a project that also uses TypeScript.

Minimum version​

Latest major versions of @slack/web-api, @slack/rtm-api, and @slack/webhook packages are supported to build against TypeScript version 5.3.x. You can try to use a greater minor version of Typescript like 5.4 or above, but beware that API Breaking Changes can be introduced in minor Typescript versions that break compatibility.

The v6 versions of @slack/web-api, @slack/rtm-api, and @slack/webhook packages are supported to build against the minimum TypeScript version v4.1.0. See also v5 to v6 migration guide for more details.

The v5 versions of @slack/web-api, @slack/rtm-api, and @slack/webhook packages are supported to build against TypeScript v3.3.0 or higher. The v4 versions of the @slack/web-api, @slack/rtm-api, and @slack/webhook packages are supported to build against TypeScript v2.7.0 or higher.

This project adheres to a support schedule so that you can predictably plan your time and effort for migration. That plan covers versions of Node.js and how they correlate to major versions of these packages. However, for TypeScript, we're using a slightly different convention. Each time a major version is released, we take the most recent version of TypeScript available, and make it the minimum. That doesn't mean that the project won't work against earlier versions of TypeScript, but it does give this project a chance to adopt new features from up to and including that version of TypeScript throughout the time that the major version of the package is supported.

Known issues​

The @slack/web-api package used to provide types only for Web API arguments until version 6.2 release. Since v6.2, the API response data are fully typed as well. To leverage the response types, upgrade your @slack/web-api package.

Since type information metadata is a crowdsourced resource provided by @types/* packages from DefinitelyTyped, certain packages might conflict with one another. One such case is the @types/bluebird@1.x package. If you need to use bluebird, we recommend updating to a newer version (at least v2). Details about this conflict can be found in issue #612.