The v2 website is live here just like before. However, the slackclient project is in maintenance mode now and this slack_sdk project is the successor.
There are a few changes introduced in v3.0:
The PyPI project is renamed from slackclient to slack_sdk
Importing slack_sdk.* is recommended. You can still use slack.* with deprecation warnings for a while.
slack_sdk has no required dependencies. This means aiohttp is no longer automatically resolved.
WebClient no longer has run_async and aiohttp specific options. If you still need the option or other aiohttp specific options, use LegacyWebClient (slackclient v2 compatible) or AsyncWebClient.
We’re sorry for the inconvenience.
Change: The PyPI project is renamed from slackclient to slack_sdk
Action: Remove slackclient, add slack_sdk in requirements.txt
Since v3, the PyPI project name is slack_sdk (technically slack-sdk also works).
The biggest reason for the renaming is the feature coverage in v3 and newer. The SDK v3 provides not only API clients but also other modules. As the first step, it starts supporting OAuth flow out-of-the-box. The secondary reason is to make the names more consistent. The renaming addresses the long-lived confusion between the PyPI project and package names.
Change: Importing slack_sdk.* is recommended. You can still use slack.* with deprecation warnings for a while.
Action: Replace from slack import, import slack, and so on in your source code.
Most imports can be simply replaced by find your_app -name '*.py' | xargs sed -i '' 's/from slack /from slack_sdk /g' or something similar. If you use slack.web.classes.*, the conversion is not so simple that we recommend manually replacing imports for those.
That said, all existing code can be migrated to v3 without any code changes. If you don’t have time for it, you can use slack package with deprecation warnings saying UserWarning: slack package is deprecated. Please use slack_sdk.web/webhook/rtm package instead. For more info, go to https://slack.dev/python-slack-sdk/v3-migration/ for a while. We won’t remove the compatibility in the short term.
Change: slack_sdk has no required dependencies. This means aiohttp is no longer automatically resolved.
Action: Add aiohttp to requirements.txt if you use any of AsyncWebClient, AsyncWebhookClient, and LegacyWebClient
If you use some modules that require aiohttp, your requirements.txt needs to explicitly have aiohttp. The slack_sdk dependency doesn’t resolve it for you, unlike slackclient v2.
Change: WebClient no longer has run_async and aiohttp specific options.
Action: If you still need the option or other aiohttp specific options, use LegacyWebClient (slackclient v2 compatible) or AsyncWebClient.
The new slack_sdk.web.WebClient doesn’t rely on aiohttp internally at all. The class provides only the synchronous way to call Web APIs. If you need a v2 compatible one, you can use LegacyWebClient. Apart from the name, there is no breaking change in the class.
If you’re using run_async=True option, we highly recommend switching to AsyncWebClient. AsyncWebClient is a straight-forward async HTTP client. You can expect the class properly works in the nature of async/await provided by the standard asyncio library.
Refer to the migration guide.
