This is a nifty slack bot that will give you random sagely advice anytime you run the /advice command. This bot is built on the Advice API.
This documentation has instructions on how to get a very basic bot setup in your local environment. It is by no means complete, but should result in a functioning bot and local development environment.
Before doing anything else we must clone this repo onto our local drives.
git clone https://github.com/joelsalt/sage-slackbot.git
For local development efforts a public url will be needed. The easiest way to do this with the least amount of latency would be to use a tool like ngrock or localtunnel. For these instructions, we will be using localtunnel. Use the command below if you have NodeJS installed.
npm install -g localtunnel
Now that we have the ability to expose our bot using a public url we need to install our bot requirements. We will be using NodeJS to run this bot, and npm to install our dependencies.
npm i
Before we can continue setup we'll need to initialize a .env file with the following elements. If you don't have some of these yet thats okay, as we'll be walking through token generation later in this readme.
TOKEN="xoxb-<YOUR SLACK OAUTH TOKEN>"
SECRET="<YOUR SLACK SIGNING SECRET>"
ADVICE_API=https://api.adviceslip.com/advice
PORT=3000
BOT_NAME=sage-botTo start our bot locally we simply need to run our npm start command.
npm start
Our bot is running on port 3000 (or whichever port we defined in our .env file), so in a new terminal window we need to run localtunnel
lt --port <BOT PORT>
Now we need to create our bot on the Slack Platform. We do this by navigating to https://api.slack.com/ and clicking the Start Building Button. We are then prompted to input an App Name that can be changed later, and what Slack organization we want to start our development in.
Now that we've got our new bot app, we'll need to add the permissions we're going to use. Navigate to "OAuth and Permissions" and add the following scopes.
Following the creation of the bot we then want to add slash command functionality to this bot. This allows users to interact with our bot via a predefined slash command. We do this by navigating to the Slash Commands link under Features. After which we will click the Create New Command button. Once we are prompted to enter information for this command we will be using the slash command /advice. For the Request URL provide the localtunnel url in that field. After which provide a Short Description and an optional Usage Hint before submitting the new slash command.
NOTE that the full request url should look like so:
https://massive-snake-60.loca.lt/slack/events
Optionally, we can fill out our bot info and add an image.
Navigate to OAuth & Permissions under the Features navigation menu, and click on the Install App to Workspace button. We'll need to collect the Bot User OAuth Access Token and the Signing Secret and add them to our .env.
Finally, we can open slack to our workspace and run the /advice command!
As of right now this is not integrated into the codebase. However, it would be trivial to setup Terraform or TravisCI to build/deploy this code to an AWS Lambda + API Gateway
npm test