fika

The fika slackbot

About the Project

Currently a work in progress / Proof of concept

Intention of this project is to automatically generate small personal 1:1 meetings among members of a slack community, while not disrupting the primary purpose of the channel itself, and respecting a rate-of-enagagement that the user is comfortable with.

The current available functionality allows:

• a user to add /fika add or remove /fika remove themselves from a channel in slack.
• a user to view the current list of subscriptions /fika list
• automaticaly create pairings via an endpoint /index/assign-groups
• automaticaly send direct messages to pairings via an endpoint /index/send-dms

Built With

• NodeJS (Node version 12 as Netlify only supports Node 12)
• MongoDB using mongoose
• Free-tier hosting on netlify

Getting Started

To get a local copy up and running follow these steps.

Prerequistes

• npm

npm install npm@latest -g

• netlify

npm install netlify-cli --global

Installation

Slack Account Setup

• Create a workspace on slack.com where you are the admin
• Create new app using the manifest slack.manifest.yml file
• Copy Signing Secret
  • Basic Information > App Credentials > Signing Secret
  • Setup Netlify environment variable described below
• Copy Bot User OAuth Token
  • OAuth & Permissions > OAuth Tokens for Your Workspace > Bot User OAuth Token
  • Setup Netlify environment variable described below

MongoDB Account Setup

• Create an account on mongodb.com
• Create a new Database cluster
• Create a user account with read/write permissions for readWriteAnyDatabase
• Create network access to be open to public (Super gross, unfortunately. So create temprorary access while in development)
• Copy the database connection string.
  • Databases > Cluster > Connect > Connect your Application
    • Choose Driver: Node.jS
    • Version: 4.0 or later
  • Setup Netlify environment variable described below

Netlify Account Setup

• Create account on netlify.com
• Get started with Netlify by following this guide.
• Create environment variables for netlify:
  • MONGODB_URI: Copied from MongoDB Setup
  • SLACK_BOT_TOKEN: Copied from Slack Setup
  • SLACK_SIGNING_SECRET: Copied from Slack Setup

Local Environment

1. Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/github_username/repo_name.git

2. Install NPM packages

npm install

3. Build project

npm run build

4. Run netlify in dev mode

netlify dev --live

5. Update Slack command endpoint to point to generated netlify url

GitHub Actions

• Leverage github action to trigger off scheduled task.
• Since netlify doesn't allow us to created scheduled functions, this is a cheap way of triggering endpoints that will run our scheduled functions
• Scheduled tasks are configured under .github/workflows
• Tasks are currently set to run every minute, however, github changes * to a frequency they prefer which seems to be about 10 minutes

Assign Groups Scheduled Task

• Create an environment variable ASSIGN_GROUPS_ENDPOINT pointing to the netlify endpoint for assign groups.

Send DM's Scheduled Task

• Create an environment variable SEND_DMS_ENDPOINT pointing to the netlify endpoint for assign groups.

Configure Run tests

• Need to update jest-settings.ts to include db connection string
• To ignore future changes to jest-settings.ts, run
  • git update-index --skip-worktree tests/jest-settings.ts
• To stop ignoring file
  • git update-index --no-skip-worktree tests/jest-settings.ts

export const CONFIG = {
	MONGODB_URI: "",
	SEND_DM_TO_GROUP: "false",
	OVERRIDE_USER_ID: "",
	SLACK_SIGNING_SECRET:'',
	SLACK_BOT_TOKEN:'',
};

Run tests

• npm run test
• npm run test -- -t 'Your test name'
• npm run test -- /path/to/test

External Resources

• Get Started on Netlify
• Netlify and MongoDB Connection