Youvandra Febrial

Posted on Aug 31

Learning n8n by Doing: First Case Study - Slack to Dev.to

#n8n #automation #agentai #slack

Automating Article Creation from Slack to Dev.to with n8n + AI

Let’s start with a case study.

I received this challenge from an Upwork job posting, and I decided to learn by actually building it.

The workflow is simple but powerful:

Take prompts from Slack (#prompt channel)
Run them through an AI model
Generate article text
Send to Slack for review, if approved →
Publish the article to Dev.to

Step 1: Create the Workflow

First, create a new workflow and add your first step.

Choose On App Event and select the Slack trigger.

Step 2: Set Up Slack Credentials

You’ll need two things:

Access Token
Signature Secret

Go to the Slack App Dashboard and:

Create a new app → From Scratch
Name it (e.g. n8n Trigger) and select your workspace
Fill your Slack credentials back in the Slack Trigger node

Get Access Token

Add scope so that n8n can access Slack:

Install the Bot User OAuth Token in your workspace and grant access to the required channel:

Get Signature Secret

Enable Event Subscriptions and add the n8n Webhook URL to the request URL:

Finally, choose the channel and add your app:

Step 3: Test the First Node

Once configured, you’ll see your first node ready:

Test it to ensure Slack messages are being captured:

Step 4: Add AI Node

Next, let’s transform Slack prompts into articles.

Add a Basic LLM Chain node
Create your article prompt
Use Slack message as the article topic
Connect it with your AI model (I used Groq in this case)

Step 5: Slack Approval Flow

Add a Slack Action Node to send the AI output for approval.

Fill the parameters like this:

In Slack, it will look like this:

Step 6: Add IF Node

To handle approval/rejection, add an IF Node:

Set the condition:

Step 7: Prepare Dev.to API

To publish on Dev.to, use their REST API:

Endpoint:

https://dev.to/api/articles

Request Sample:

{
  "article": {
    "title": "string",
    "body_markdown": "string",
    "published": false,
    "series": "string",
    "main_image": "string",
    "canonical_url": "string",
    "description": "string",
    "tags": "string",
    "organization_id": 0
  }
}