A chat bot for Slack based on llimllib/slask.

Features

• Based on slack Real Time Messaging API
• Simple plugins mechanism
• Messages can be handled concurrently
• Automatically reconnect to slack when connection is lost

Installation

sudo pip install slackbot

Usage

Generate the slack api token

First you need to get the slack api token for your bot. You have two options:

1. If you use a bot user integration of slack, you can get the api token on the integration page.
2. If you use a real slack user, you can generate an api token on slack web api page.

Configure the api token

This uses a configuration file and looks for a section called slackbot. Both the config file and its spec are specified using Panoptez-specific names:

• PZBOT_CONFIG
• PZBOT_CONFIG_SPEC

If these don't exist, the bot fails startup.

The available keys include:

• debug (default: False)
• api_token (default: '')
• plugins (default: ['slackbot.plugins'])

Here's an example:

[slackbot]
debug = False
api_token = ''
plugins = ['slackbot.plugins',]

Note the trailing comma, to force the ConfigObj to parse as a list.

Under slackbot, a [[handlers]] subsection can be added that specifies how to handle bot messages. The format is bot_id = handler module.

Run the bot

from slackbot.bot import Bot
def main():
    bot = Bot()
    bot.run()
    
if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

Now you can talk to your bot in your slack client!

Plugins

A chat bot is meaningless unless you can extend/customize it to fit your own use cases.

To write a new plugin, simplely create a function decorated by slackbot.bot.respond_to or slackbot.bot.listen_to:

• A function decorated with respond_to is called when a message matching the pattern is sent to the bot (direct message or @botname in a channel/group chat)
• A function decorated with listen_to is called when a message matching the pattern is sent on a channel/group chat (not directly sent to the bot)

from slackbot.bot import respond_to
from slackbot.bot import listen_to

@respond_to('I love you')
def love(message):
    message.reply('I love you too!')

@listen_to('Can someone help me?')
def help(message):
    # Message is replied to the sender (prefixed with @user)
    message.reply('Yes, I can!')

    # Message is sent on the channel
    # message.send('I can help everybody!')

To extract params from the message, you can use regular expression:

from slackbot.bot import respond_to

@respond_to('Give me (.*)')
def giveme(message, something):
    message.reply('Here is %s' % something)

And add the plugins module to PLUGINS list of slackbot settings, e.g. slackbot_settings.py:

PLUGINS = [
    'slackbot.plugins',
    'mybot.plugins',
]