Slack - Bot

This project was created out of a need to organize pinned items in our Slack channel by title. Note that our pinned items' titles are entered, precisely, with a prefixed date. This has enabled sorting for these pinned items, as Slack currently doesn't support sorted pinned items by date, as native channel functionality.

Goal

1. Have the bot respond to the command 'shows' by returning all pinned items as:
   • PINNED_ITEM_TITLE - PINNED_ITEM_PERMALINK

Technologies Used

• Python 3.6.2
• Django
• Django REST Framework
• Slack Client

Slight Deviations from the below tutorials

• One thing I did was swap out the SLACK_BOT_USER_TOKEN for the SLACK_OAUTH_TOKEN. This token can be found in the OAuth & Permissions page for your app. It will be called OAuth Access Token. I needed this token because the Bot User OAuth Access Token, doesn't have access to the pins.read scope at this time. This scope is required for this Slack Bot.
• In Slack/settings.py, I made all the Slack tokens retrieved from environment variables.
  • To configure these variables locally on UNIX, run:
    • export SLACK_BLAH_BLAH_BLAH_TOKEN='some_value_here'
  • To configure these variables on Heroku
    1. Go to Settings
    2. Config Variables, and press Reveal Config Vars
    3. Add the key name for your token, and the corresponding value

Heroku Specific Files

• Procfile
  • This tells Heroku what type of process it needs to run, and the command to run on the commandline
• runtime.txt
  • This tells Heroku what version of Python your Heroku app needs to run

Super-Helpful Tutorials

• Making a simple Django Slack App with a Bot
  • https://medium.com/freehunch/how-to-build-a-slack-bot-with-python-using-slack-events-api-django-under-20-minute-code-included-269c3a9bf64e
• Deploying a Django App to Heroku
  • https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/deploying-python

Please feel free to fork this project and make pull requests!