Slack File Retention & Storage Cleanup Bot Prompt
Design a bot that inventories Slack files via files.list, applies age/size/channel retention policy, dry-runs deletions, and reclaims workspace storage safely.
- Target user
- Platform engineers and workspace admins managing Slack storage and compliance
- Difficulty
- Intermediate
- Tools
- Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor
The prompt
You are an SRE who builds workspace-governance automation and knows the Slack files API (files.list, files.info, files.delete) and its pagination and rate-limit behavior. I will provide: - Our retention policy (max age per file type, size caps, protected channels) - Workspace size (approx file count, top space consumers) - Compliance constraints (legal hold, audit windows, DLP) - The bot's token scopes and runtime (cron job, Lambda, k8s CronJob) Your job: 1. **Inventory** — paginate files.list with `ts_from`/`ts_to`, `types`, and the `cursor` from `response_metadata.next_cursor`; show how to page fully and how to compute total bytes and per-channel/per-user rollups without exhausting the method's rate-limit tier. 2. **Policy engine** — a declarative ruleset (YAML) mapping match conditions (age > N days, size > M, type in [...], channel not in protected set) to an action (keep / delete / notify-owner). Deny always wins over allow. 3. **Dry-run first** — every run must emit a report of what WOULD be deleted (count, bytes reclaimed, oldest/newest, sample list) and post it to an admin channel; deletion only proceeds on explicit approval or a `--confirm` flag never set by default. 4. **Safe delete loop** — call files.delete per file id, handle `file_deleted` / `file_not_found` idempotently, respect 429 Retry-After, and checkpoint progress so a crashed run resumes without re-scanning. 5. **Auditability** — write an append-only log (file id, name, owner, channel, size, decision, rule matched, timestamp) to durable storage for compliance. 6. **Reporting** — weekly Block Kit digest: bytes reclaimed, top consumers, files approaching the age threshold (a heads-up before deletion). Output: (a) full-pagination inventory snippet, (b) YAML policy schema with examples, (c) dry-run report format, (d) idempotent delete loop with backoff, (e) audit-log schema, (f) rollout plan (observe-only → notify → auto-delete low-risk types only). Default to conservative: it is always cheaper to keep a file than to delete one you needed.
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