Chef Community Slack

Hello and welcome! This page will walk you through joining and using the Chef community Slack team. If you have any questions about anything here, please don't hesitate to contact us at slack@chef.io.

Getting Started with Slack

To register for our Slack team, please enter your email address below. Whatever address you use with be visible to other Slack users, but can be any address you want to use.

The Chef community is a mixture of professionals and volunteers who come from all over the world and work together to make Chef better. Community members fulfill many roles, including mentoring, teaching, and connecting with other members of the community. All participants in the Chef Community Slack agree to follow the Chef Community Guidelines.

Once you submit the signup form you'll receive an email from Slack to continue the signup process. Once you finish the signup process you can use Slack via their web application or download a desktop or mobile client.

Slack Channels

By default you will be added to the #general channel which is our general-purpose discussion chat. Other more topic-specific channels are available in the channels menu on the left.

Setting Up Your Slack Profile

Once registered for Slack, you can customize your profile through the Slack website. Here you can set the name and avatar people will see when you chat with them.

I Need Help With Slack!

You can check out Slack's Help Center documentation for answers to many common problems. If you are already logged in to Slack, you can ask for assistance in the #general channel.

Slack-tiquette

As with IRC, Slack has some of its own customs and etiquette. Our community Slack is a volunteer-run organization so it is possible that there may be no one around to help at times. Feel free to re-ask later on when more people are around, or wait for a community member to check the recent scrollback.

Slack offers two channel-wide broadcast aliases: @channel and @here. Use these very sparingly. Remember that use of these can send push notifications to a large number of users, who may be confused or frustrated if the message was less critical than they originally thought.

FAQ

• What Is Slack?
  • Slack is a real-time chat system similar to IRC or Jabber. Here you can find Chef community members to ask questions, learn more about Chef, or socialize with our awesome community.
• Why Slack?
  • Chef used IRC for our community chat for many years, however stagnation of the user experience for IRC combined with many improvements available from Slack prompted us to reconsider this. You can read more about the rationale of the move in Chef RFC 74.
• Can I Use My Supermarket or Discourse Account?
  • Unfortunately not at this time. For now your Slack account is independent of the other Chef community tools.
• Where I Can Find Logs Of Slack Channels?
  • You can find a permanent, searchable archive of our Slack channels at SlackArchive. You can also search the last ten thousand messages from within the Slack client. Be aware that archiving must be configured for each channel by inviting the @slack_archive_bot account.
• Where Else Can I Find Help With Chef?
  • We have a mailing list and forum at discourse.chef.io if you prefer a more asynchronous approach. We also have volunteers on StackOverflow. If volunteer support isn't available, you can reach Chef Software's support team at support@chef.io.
• I Really Like IRC, What Do I Do?
  • Slack does offer an IRC gateway, though it has historically had some stability issues.