Flamboi Slack API

Flameboi is CodeDevils's Slack API bot that posts interactive messages and offers commands to users on CodeDevils' Slack.

How to Install

1) (Optional) Install Virtualenv

This is an optional step, but is recommended to keep your local Python dependency versions separate from Flamboi's. With many Python projects, bugs can exist in apps when versions of the same dependencies are shared globally across your code repos.

Linux

Install package

sudo apt-get install python3-virtualenv

Activate easy installation script

sudo easy_install virtualenv

Install pip Virtualenv

sudo pip3 install virtualenv

Ensure Virtualenv is Installed

Ensure Virtualenv is installed by calling virtualenv

If virtualenv appears to not be installed, ensure that it is on your path. You can do this by adding the installation folder to the PATH variable within your profile. An example would be within ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc, adding PATH=$PATH:~/.local/bin.

Start an issue or post a question in CodeDevils Slack for further help in adding virtualenv to your path variable.

Create a directory

This directory will be used to house the environments on your machine. You can name this anything, and place it anywhere, for the purposes of this README it will be ~/virtualenvs/.

1. mkdir ~/virtualenvs

Create Your Environment

You can name this anything and place it anywhere, but for this README it will be flameboi-slack-api.

1. virtualenv ~/virtualenvs/flameboi-slack-api

Activate Your Environment

Do this by calling the activate file/script within your newly created virtualenv directory's bin/ directory.

1. source ~/virtualenvs/flameboi-slack-api/bin/activate

Windows

WIP

2) Install Dependencies

If you are using a virtual environment, ensure that you have activated your environment. You will know if the name of the virtualenv directory is written prior to other text within your shell.

1. cd /path/to/flameboi-slack-api
2. pip3 install -r requirements/local.txt

Further Reading and Documentation

Slack Documentation

• Getting started with Slack apps
• Slack Events API documentation - Used for the bot to receive designated events from Slack
• Slack Web API documentation - Used for the bot to send/request items to Slack

Documentation for Primary Tools

• virtualenv - virtual Python development environment
• flask - Python web application framework
• python-slackclient - Python Slack API library
• serverless - npm deployment tool used to deploy slack app to AWS Lambda
• Slack Blockkit Builder - Python library, written by Kevin, for building Slack blocks

Documentation for Other Helpful Tools

• ngrok - Utility to expose a local webserver to the internet
• postman - Utility used to design, build, and test APIs
• Markdown CheatSheet - For Pierson :troll:
• CodeDevils - This is us!

Contributing

Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for information.

Quality of Code

Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for information.