Using bots

If your app needs to take action in Asana (e.g. interact with tasks/projects/comments etc.), you may want to authenticate these actions with a bot account so Asana users see your app’s actions authored by a machine and not a human colleague.

Using bot accounts can also be useful for limiting the scope of an app.

Creating a bot

1. Create an email account with your organization’s email domain (you can use an existing one if it’s not already in your Asana org)
2. Create a new Asana user in your org using this email account. You can do this through the API, UI, or have your Asana admin do it
3. Login to Asana as this new user
4. Update the Asana account profile to make it clear that this is a bot account with a specific purpose and not a human
5. Go to the developer console and generate a PAT
6. Use this PAT to authenticate your app

Restricting scopes

If you want to change your app’s permissions, follow the above instructions for creating a bot except create an Asana account that is a limited access member or guest instead of a regular member of the org. These account types have limited access within Aasna and can only see the projects/tasks they’ve been invited to.

Guests are more restricted than limited access members. Read the linked docs to understand the nuances between these account types and how they’re restricted. These restrictions will be mirrored in the API.

Note: Limited access members need to have the same email domain as the rest of your Asana organization. Guests need to have a different email domain.

To restrict scopes, log back into your normal Asana account. Then, invite the new limited access or guest user you just created only to the tasks/projects that you want it to have access to. Your app’s scope will now be limited to the permissions of the guest/limited access account you’ve created.

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More features coming soon

Asana is actively building more API scopes and better bot features. To stay informed on new platform features such as these, subscribe to the changelog section of the developer forum.