A @resourcebot for Slack

Let your teammates know when you're using shared resources (say, staging servers) by adding a @resourcebot to your team's slack.

Your @resourcebot will respond to the following DM commands (you'll see the same output when you DM the help command):

Command                   Description
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
list                      List all resources
list available            List all resources which are currently available

add <name>                Add a resource with name <name>
remove <name>             Remove the resource with name <name>

claim <name> [duration]   Claim resource with name <name>
                          If [duration] is not applied, defaults to 1 hour.
                          Example durations are: "for 1 day", "until tonight"

release <name>            Release your claim on resource with name <name>
unclaim <name>            Release your claim on resource with name <name>

A quick thanks to Botkit!

This code has been built on top of Botkit ("Building Blocks for Building Bots"). Thanks Botkit!

Botkit designed to ease the process of designing and running useful, creative or just plain weird bots (and other types of applications) that live inside Slack!

It provides a semantic interface to sending and receiving messages so that developers can focus on creating novel applications and experiences instead of dealing with API endpoints.

Botkit features a comprehensive set of tools to deal with Slack's integration platform, and allows developers to build both custom integrations for their team, as well as public "Slack Button" applications that can be run from a central location, and be used by many teams at the same time.

Installation/Getting Started

1. Clone this repository

git clone git@github.com:pariser/resourcebot.git

2. Set up a mongo database for your resourcebot to use.

3. In slack, if necessary, add a new bot.

4. Go to Slack's "new bot" page: https://my.slack.com/services/new/bot

5. When you click "Add Bot Integration", you are taken to a page where you can customize your bot's details. Choose a name (this README assumes you'll use the name @resourcebot). You can also add a fun avatar and description.

6. Copy the API token that Slack gives you. You'll need it to configure your server...

7. Add a new file .env in the project root and add:

``` SLACK_TOKEN= MONGO_URI= ```

5. Run the bot app:

nodemon bot.js

Your bot should be online! Open a DM with your bot and send it a message. Try help or list.

6. NOTE: Your bot has to be invited into a channel in order for it to listen for commands outside of a DM.

To invite your bot into a new channel, switch to the target channel and type: /invite @<my bot>.

After inviting the bot into this new channel, run a resourcebot command. Try @resourcebot help or @resourcebot list.

Deployment and Monitoring

Capistrano has been configured to deploy resourcebot via git hooks from branch master. You should commit and push your changes to master before deploying.

For deployment, add a .env file on your server with the keys SLACK_TOKEN and MONGO_URI, just as you would have done above. I recommend adding two different bots (say development-resourcebot and resourcebot) with different keys.

Deployment

cap production deploy

The ./bot.js script which actually runs resourcebot will be launched and monitored by forever.

Other useful cap tasks are:

• resourcebot:start
• resourcebot:stop
• resourcebot:restart
• resourcebot:status
• logs:tail

The forever daemon process actually captures and routes the server logs. To find the log location from the server you can type forever logs.