Troubleshooting

Slack capture is designed to fail loudly and safely: forged requests are rejected, retries never duplicate work, and a broken setup refuses to start rather than limping along. Here are the failure modes that actually exist, and what to do about each.

"RyTask isn't connected to this Slack workspace yet"

Typing /task gets you this quiet reply when there is no active connection for your Slack workspace — either it was never connected, or an admin has since disconnected it. The fix is in the message: an admin connects (or reconnects) in Settings → Integrations.

Slash commands fail and nothing is ever created

Every request from Slack is verified before any work happens: RyTask recomputes Slack's signature over the raw request body using SLACK_SIGNING_SECRET and rejects anything that doesn't match — or whose timestamp is more than five minutes old — with a 401. Forged or replayed requests never create anything.

The flip side: if the signing secret on your server doesn't match the Slack app (a typo, or the secret was rotated in Slack), every webhook is rejected the same way. If /task consistently errors in Slack and the API logs show 401s on the Slack routes, re-copy the Signing Secret from the Slack app's Basic Information page into SLACK_SIGNING_SECRET and restart.

A task was created, but it has no reporter

The captor's Slack account isn't linked to a RyTask account, so the item couldn't be attributed — the capture confirmation will have said so. The item itself is fine. An admin can link the person under Settings → Integrations → Slack users; see user mapping.

Slack said "On it — capturing…" but no item appeared

The acknowledgement comes from the API; the actual creation runs on the background worker. If items stop appearing, the worker is the place to look:

docker compose logs worker

A common, self-explaining case is no default project: the follow-up message in Slack says RyTask has no default project for capture yet, and an admin needs to pick one in Settings → Integrations. If there's no follow-up message at all, check that the worker container is running and healthy.

Capture keeps working after disconnecting

It shouldn't, and it doesn't. Disconnecting in Settings → Integrations revokes the connection immediately: the next /task gets the "isn't connected" reply, and any capture jobs already queued at that moment notice the revoked connection and quietly do nothing — no orphaned items appear after the fact.

The API won't start after configuring Slack

When Slack is configured (client ID, client secret, and signing secret all set), RyTask requires a valid token-encryption key and otherwise refuses to boot, with one of:

Refusing to start: SLACK_TOKEN_ENC_KEY is required when Slack is configured.
Generate one with `openssl rand -base64 32`.

Refusing to start: SLACK_TOKEN_ENC_KEY must be a base64-encoded 32-byte key (got N bytes).
Generate one with `openssl rand -base64 32`.

This is deliberate — the Slack bot token is encrypted at rest, and starting without a proper key would mean storing it badly. Generate a key with openssl rand -base64 32, set SLACK_TOKEN_ENC_KEY, and start again. See the environment variables reference.