Slackoff

The Friday-fun-time bot. Born of beer.

What is it?

This is the simple slack chat bot that a few of us put together one epic Friday. Unlike other beer fueled ideas, this one actually works pretty well and didn't require a trip to the hospital.

How do I use it?

It's nodejs, so if you do node, you'll be pretty at home here. You probably want a pretty recent version of node. Might I also suggest nvm and yarn? To get the ball rolling

Install the dependencies

yarn install

You'll need to get a slack bot token (https://my.slack.com/services/new/bot). Then create a file called config.json in the root of the project and add something like this to it

{
  "token": "xoxb-8657309-X0DEADBEEFCAFE-crossfitp90xpaleobaconator",
  "name": "dbcbot"
}

Run the thing

yarn start

With any luck, your bot is now connected to Slack. Good for you! I'd suggest joining the #test- channel on the elastic slack and inviting your bot to it by @mentioning it.

Now you can interact with it by @mentioning. Try

@dbcbot help

Now what?

Well, the bot does some simple stuff, but I bet you have ideas for more! Adding commands is pretty trivial. Drop into the commands/ directory and take a look around. I'd suggest copying the random.js and working off of that. That will teach you how arguments work and get you simple string replies.

If you want todo more than string replies (you do), then you probably want to return something more complex from your function. If you want to upload files take a look at kitten.js for an example.

Once you've created your function, import it to index.js and add it to the object that is exported. Whatever you export it as becomes the command name.

But I want to use an entirely different API

Now we're talking! Slackathon can do that. See the types/ directory. Each of these maps to an object type that is returned from a command. See file.js. That maps up to the {type: 'file'} that is returned from kitten.js.

As you can see, file.js is the bit that actually does the uploading to slack.

Annnnd GO!

That should be everything you need to hack on this.

The future

• Allow the bot to connect to networks aside from slack. This should be pretty simple, you just need another layer and a bit more config. Commands wouldn't change, but you'd need a type handler for each kind of network
• Your totally excellent idea here.