Ncurses Workflow Approvals in Slack

The approval request appears in Slack without warning. A green button. A red button. Your workflow hangs in the balance until someone clicks.

Ncurses, the classic terminal UI library, doesn’t belong in Slack. But with a clean integration, your Ncurses-driven processes can trigger workflow approvals directly inside the chat stream. No context switches. No email threads. Just one seamless path from terminal to decision.

The core idea is simple: bind your Ncurses application’s events to Slack’s interactive message API. When a task reaches a point that needs sign-off—deployments, configuration changes, resource allocations—the app sends a payload to a Slack channel. That payload creates an interactive block with Approve/Reject actions. Once a user responds, Slack posts the result back to your backend, completing the loop in real time.

To build it, you link Ncurses with a backend service in Python, Go, or Node. That backend uses Slack’s Web API and Events API to drive messages. Handle authentication with Slack OAuth, store tokens securely, and verify every interaction request via signing secrets. Keep it lean: events from Ncurses push through a message queue, outbound to Slack in JSON form. The approval response returns to Ncurses via that queue, updating the terminal UI instantly.

Triggering workflow approvals in Slack from Ncurses has clear advantages: reduced friction, faster decision cycles, and traceable audit logs within Slack itself. Engineers keep their focus inside the terminal; approvers stay in Slack. There’s no need to move across tools. The approval becomes as quick as typing a message.

This system works best when wrapped in automation: set up default approvers per task type, log every decision to persistent storage, and alert both Slack and the terminal when state changes. Keep UI minimal in Ncurses—approve states in green, reject states in red—mirroring the Slack buttons to remove ambiguity.

Ncurses workflow approvals in Slack turn static terminal operations into dynamic, team-ready processes. No one is left guessing. The request goes out, the answer comes back, and your job keeps moving.

Want this working without weeks of glue code? Try it now with hoop.dev. See Ncurses workflows trigger Slack approvals live in minutes.