Getting Started

What you need, how to run it locally, and how to get a thread talking end to end.

Getting sark running is four steps, and only the last one involves Slack.

Install

Requirements, dependencies, and generating .dev.vars.

Quickstart

Drive a thread end to end with no Slack app.

Connect Slack

Manifest, bot token, and the fail-closed allowlist.

The short version

npm install
npm run dev-vars          # writes .dev.vars (BOX_API_KEY comes from your `box` CLI login)
npm run dev               # local worker on :8787

npm run drive -- --thread demo "create hello.txt with the word banana and tell me what you did"

What you need before any of that

An ascii.dev Box account. This Worker is a control plane for Box sandboxes and does nothing without one. You need a box_... API key.
Cloudflare Workers with Durable Objects. The per-thread state machine is a Durable Object with a SQLite backend, which is not available on the free plan.
Node 22+ and the box CLI.
A Slack app is optional. The /api surface exercises the whole pipeline without one.

Throughout these docs, https://<your-worker>.workers.dev stands in for your own deployed origin. Your real settings go in .deploy.env (gitignored), never in wrangler.jsonc.

One caveat about local development

The box has to be able to reach your Worker's /mcp endpoint to say anything. A local wrangler dev on localhost:8787 is not reachable from a cloud sandbox, so a local run exercises the watchdog fallback path instead: the reply is recovered from the box event log rather than posted by the agent.

Full end-to-end runs go against the deployed Worker:

npm run drive -- --url https://<your-worker>.workers.dev --thread demo "hello"