Running Ark

Local development

After installing and configuring:

# Build and run
make build
bin/ark

Or in one step:

crystal run src/main.cr

You should see:

INFO  starting ark region=us-east-1 agent=ABCDEFGHIJ
INFO  resolved bot identity: U1234567
INFO  socket mode: connected

Verifying the connection

1. Open Slack and send a direct message to your bot
2. You should see an :eyes: reaction appear on your message
3. The bot responds with the Bedrock Agent's reply

For channel mentions:

@Ark what is our refund policy?

The bot responds in a thread.

Log levels

Set LOG_LEVEL to control verbosity:

Level	What it shows
debug	Everything including Bedrock response sizes and internal state
info	Startup, connections, message processing
warn	File download issues, unsupported types, reaction failures
error	Agent invoke failures, Firehose publish errors

Graceful shutdown

Ark handles SIGINT and SIGTERM for graceful shutdown:

# If running in foreground
Ctrl+C

# If running as a service
kill -TERM <pid>

Health check

Ark doesn't expose an HTTP port (Socket Mode is outbound-only). To verify the process is healthy, check the logs or process status:

# Check if running
pgrep -f ark

# Watch logs
LOG_LEVEL=debug bin/ark