House points are awarded to students at Hogwarts that do good deeds, correctly answer a question in class,
or win a Quidditch Match. They can also be taken away for misbehaving or rule-breaking.
"While you are at Hogwarts, your triumphs will earn your House points, while any rule-breaking will lose House points.
At the end of the year, the House with the most points is awarded the House Cup, a great honor. I hope each of you will be a credit to whichever
House becomes yours."
-- Minerva McGonagall
The House Cup was a yearly award given at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry; it was given at the end of the school year to the house with the most House Points. This Slack application was developed to simulate the House Cup within your workspace, you can give points to your teammates or colleagues for taking time to help you out but also you can take them away if they did something not cool, like enter a meeting 10 minutes late.
Let the games begin!
Originally I started to develop this app following the steps below, but since it was too tedious to copy the lambda function each time to test I used AWS SAM, this allowed me to test locally, and to deploy it was really simple, AWS SAM packages and upload the deployment artifacts generated to an Amazon S3 bucket (created by AWS SAM CLI), and then deploys the application using CloudFormation, so the only thing you need to create beforehand is the dynamoDB table.
AWS Console -> Services -> DynamoDB -> Create table
- Table name: Hogwarts_Alumni
- Primary Key: username
- Click Create
NOTE: DynamoDB was chosen because it is a NoSQL database and therefore it provides a flexible schema. We can have varied data within our table, this means for this example that for each wizard we can have as many attributes as we want, and not all of the wizards are forced to have them (as long as they have Primary Keys of course).
AWS Console -> Services -> Lambda -> Create function
- Select Author from scratch
- Function name: DumbledorePoints
- Runtime: Python 3.6
- Create function
NOTE: Since I used AWS SAM, I did not have to copy my code directly into the AWS Lambda designer but if you don't want to do it with SAM you will need to create a zip package to upload it directly or re-arrange the functions into a single file, for more inforrmation you can go to AWS Lambda deployment package in Python.
Within the function go to Permissions and click on the Role name, this will take you to Identity and Access Management
- Click on Attach policies
- AmazonDynamoDBFullAccess
- CloudWatchFullAccess
On the lambda function, click on Add trigger
- Select API Gateway
- Select Create an API
- API Type: REST API
- Click Add
Go to https://api.slack.com/apps and click on Create new app
- App Name: Dumbledore Points
- Development Slack Workspace: < up 2 you >
- Create App
After creating the app select Slash commands -> Create New Command
- Command: /dumbledore
- Request URL: This will be the API Gateway url
- Short description: type "/dumbledore" to get the instructions
- Click Save
Under Basic Information, look for Signing Secret, go to the Lambda Function in the AWS Management Console and add that as an environment variable:
- Name: SLACK_KEY
- Value: < your secret >
Also I used another environment variable to set the channel in which the slack app will be running, if you want it to be channel independent just comment the following part in app.py:
channel_id = params['channel_id']
if channel_id[0] != CHANNEL_ID: # This is only for locking the slash command to a single channel
message = respond({'text': '_The *Marauder\'s Map* shows everyone, use it to find the slack channel where '
'this feature is located_'})`NOTE: The main reason why lock this command into a channel is because the responses take a lot of space, and you wouldn't want to have to scroll a lot to find the message that you are looking for, so it'll be better to have it in a separate channel just for that purpose
There are different order that you can give with the same slash command /dumbledore, the first thing you need
to do is to enroll to Hogwarts and to do so you can use the following commands:
Enroll to Hogwarts:
If you know which house you belong to just add yourself to it, optionally you can set the option :sorting-hat: which ..well
you should know this unless you are a muggle.
/dumbledore set house gryffindorif you know which house you belong to/dumbledore set house :sorting-hat:if you want the sorting hat to take care of your house allocation
Set your title (optional): You can set a cool title next to your name
/dumbledore set title Diana Patron, Advisor to the Minister for Magic
NOTE: If you can't find a cool title that goes with your moto go take a look at this site Wizard Ranks and Titles
Give Points: You can give points to 1 or more wizards at a time:
/dumbledore give 10 points from @wizard1 @wizard2/dumbledore +10 @wizard1 @wizard2
Remove Points: You can also remove points from 1 or more wizards a time
/dumbledore remove 10 points from @wizard1 @wizard2/dumbledore -10 @wizard1 @wizard2
Display the leaderboards: You can display the leaderboard for all off the houses, or optionally you can display your house's leaderboard with the total of points of the house and the members leaderboard
/dumbledore leaderboard/dumbledore gryffindor
If you mess something up you will most likely end with a random message from dumbledore.
NOTE: I used emojis for the sorting hat feature and some of the bot responses
Since I needed interaction with the AWS infrastructure I implemented my tests with:
- boto3: the AWS SDK for Python and moto
- moto: a library that allows you to easily mock AWS services so that you can run unit tests locally, with expected responses from AWS, without actually calling any services/resources on AWS.
To run the functional and unit tests run the following command:
python -m pytest tests/ -s -vv
