cakebot

A pulumi built slackbot that tracks cake snipes

Cake Snipes

A wonderful teaching opportunity presents itself when a co-worker leaves their laptop unlocked and unattended. Traditionally you'd write a funny quip from that co-worker into a public slack channel.

Hurr Durr I'm a dumb dumb

or

I do bad code

The lesson? Co-workers can be jerks. But we pretend it's for teaching security.

We like to call this behaviour "sniping".

I was recently introduced to a new concept, via the twitters, whereby instead of writing unfunny comments on behalf of a co-worker, you instead write "cake". Each "cake" is worth 1 point against. 3 points against and you buy cake (or donuts, or other tasty pastries) for the entire team.

Hence, cake snipe.

I'm still not sure if gamifying this behaviour is a good or bad thing, but let there be cake.

Setup

You'll need to configure your own Slack application in your own Slack organisation. These are the basics:

• Visit https://api.slack.com/apps and Create New App
• Copy your Verification Token and Access Token as we'll need them shortly
• Under OAuth & Permissions add the channels:history and chat:write scopes
• Under Event Subscriptions add message.channels to Selected Events
• Under Event Subscriptions you'll need to add the Bot URL (see below) to Request URL

To install the bot, you'll need to install pulumi which is a set of libraries and tools for automating cloud infrastructure. We'll use this to create a Lambda function and API Gateway in AWS. You'll need to create a Pulumi account - this is free at the time of writing.

Add your tokens to the Pulumi configuration, and setup your AWS keys:

npm install
export AWS_PROFILE=<profile-name>  # aws credentials
pulumi config set cloud:provider aws
pulumi config set --secret cakebot:verificationToken <your-slack-verification-token>
pulumi config set --secret cakebot:slackToken <xoxa-2-your-slack-api-token>

Now, create the AWS resources and upload the bot:

pulumi update  # provisions AWS resources and uploads the lambda

The output will show you the URL for interacting with your bot. Plug it into the Slack bot Event Subscriptions Request URL section with /cake/events suffixed. If everything worked, the URL will show Verified next to it.

Now, invite your bot into the channels you want it to monitor for cake. Type a few messages including the word cake, and you should start seeing responses from your bot!

Troubleshooting

• Make sure your URLs do NOT have trailing slashes
• Cloudwatch logs will be very valuable for diagnosing issues
• There can sometimes be large delays (10 - 20s) before cake bot sends a response

Features

See Issues for a list of TODO items. This is a work in progress. So far the bot will track the number of cakes and respond to each instance.