Stream supports several slash commands out of the box:

  • /giphy query
  • /ban @userid reason
  • /unban @userid
  • /mute @userid
  • /unmute @userid

Additionally, it’s possible to add your own commands.

By using Custom Commands, you can receive all messages sent using a specific slash command, eg. /ticket, in your application. When configured, every slash command message happening in a Stream Chat application will propagate to an endpoint via an HTTP POST request.

Setting up your Custom Command consists of the following steps:

  1. Registering your Custom Command

  2. Configure a Channel Type

  3. Configuring a Custom Action Handler URL

  4. Implement a handler for your Custom Command

Registering Custom Commands

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The API provides methods to create, list, get, update, and delete Custom Command definitions. These determine which commands are allowed to be used and how they're presented to the user by providing a description of the command.

Command Fields

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nametypedescriptiondefaultoptional
namestringname of the command-
descriptionstringdescription, shown in commands auto-completion-
argsstringarguments help text, shown in commands auto-completion-
setstringset name used for grouping commands-

Creating a Command

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List Commands

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You can retrieve the list of all commands defined for your application.

Get a Command

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You can retrieve a custom command definition.

Edit a Command

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Custom command description, args & set can be changed. Only the fields that must change need to be provided, fields that are not provided to this API will remain unchanged.

Remove a Command

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You can remove a custom command definition.

You cannot delete a custom command if there are any active channel configurations referencing it explicitly.

Configure a Channel Type

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In order to be able to use this command in a channel, we’ll need to create, or update an existing, channel type to include the ticket command.

Configure a Custom Action URL

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In order to use the defined custom commands, you will first have to set an endpoint URL in the App Settings.

You can use a {type} variable substitution in the URL to pass on the name of the command that was triggered. See Webhooks Overview for more information on URL configuration

Request format

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Your endpoint will receive a POST request with a JSON encoded body containing: message, user and form_data objects. The form_data object will contain values of the interactions initiated by either Attachment or MML actions.

Response format

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If you intend to make any change to the message, you should return a JSON encoded response with the same message structure. Please note that not all message fields can be changed, the full list of fields that can be modified is available in the rewriting messages section.

Discarding messages

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Your endpoint can decide to reject the command and return a user message. To do that the endpoint must return a regular message with type set to error.

Rewriting messages

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You can also decide to modify the message, in that case you return the updated version of the message and it will overwrite the user input.

Interactions can be initiated either using Attachment actions:

Or by using MML formatted messages:

You can find more information on message rewrite in Before Message Send Webhook page

Performance considerations

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Your webhook endpoint will be part of the send message transaction, so you should avoid performing any remote calls or potentially slow operations while processing the request. Stream Chat will give your endpoint 1 second of time to reply. If your endpoint is not available (ie. returns a response with status codes 4xx or 5xx) or takes too long, Stream Chat will continue with the execution and save the message as usual.

To make sure that an outage on the hook does not impact your application, Stream will pause your webhook once it is considered unreachable and it will automatically resume once the webhook is found to be healthy again.

Example code

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An example of how to handle incoming Custom Command requests can be found in this repo.