Simple daily standup async bot for remote teams who use Slack.

Made with Django, AWS Lambda and zappa framework.

You can now use Docker insted of Zappa. Read below for instructions.

How it looks like?

Once a day a bot writes to selected members list of questions for standup. Users and questions configured in Admin interface.

After user answer this questions the whole answer is posted to public channel.

How the result looks like?

Post in public channel

Prerequirements

In order to quickly use this bot you need to:

1. Create AWS account to use Lambda
2. Create new Slack App and Slack bot
3. Deploy a service with zappa and add a webhook for Slack bot
4. Tune bot with you texts and users
5. Authorize your app in you Slack team

Looks hard, but the whole process unlikely takes longer than 30 minutes.

Settings file

All environment variables are stored into slack/settings/settings.yml file which is of course ignored. Because file is yaml we can create multiple environment and inherite them. So the file structure must be like that

default_env: &default_env
  SECRET_KEY: 
  DEBUG: true
  DB_ENGINE: 'django.db.backends.postgresql'
  SLACK_CLIENT_ID: 
  SLACK_CLIENT_SECRET: 
  SLACK_VERIFICATION_TOKEN: 
  SLACK_BOT_USER_TOKEN: 
  TEXT_NO_MORE_QUESTIONS: 'Красава, ты уже отправил сегодняшний стэндап.'
  TEXT_STANDUP_IS_DONE: 'Стэндап закончен :tada:. Спасибо за ответы!'
  TEXT_NO_USER: 'Тебе проходить стэндап не нужно.'
  TEXT_CHANNEL_MESSAGE: '<@{}> закончил стэндап. Красава!'
  TEXT_NEW_DAY: 'Привет! Пришло время нового стэндапа.'
  SLACK_COMMON_CHANNEL: 

local:
  <<: *default_env
  SECRET_KEY: 
  DB_NAME: 
  DB_HOST: 
  DB_PORT: 
  DB_USER: 
  DB_PASSWORD: 

dev:
  <<: *default_env
  SECRET_KEY: 
  DEBUG: false
  DB_NAME: 
  DB_HOST: 
  DB_PORT: 
  DB_USER: 
  DB_PASSWORD: 

• SECRET_KEY — Django secrete key. You can generate it here.
• DEBUG — Django debug key
• DB_ENGINE — Django engine for DB. We use Postgres with django.db.backends.postgresql.
• SLACK_CLIENT_ID — Slack client id which you can find on your app page like https://api.slack.com/apps/XXXXXX
• SLACK_CLIENT_SECRET — Slack client secret which you can find on your app page like https://api.slack.com/apps/XXXXXX
• SLACK_VERIFICATION_TOKEN — Slack client verification token which you can find on your app page like https://api.slack.com/apps/XXXXXX
• SLACK_BOT_USER_TOKEN — Slack bot user token which you can find on your app page in bot users section
• TEXT_NO_MORE_QUESTIONS — The text when user has submitted standut for today and writes another message
• TEXT_STANDUP_IS_DONE — A greeting message which is sent right after the answer for the last question
• TEXT_NO_USER — A message for user which shouldn't write standup (for example, if somebody randomly sent a message to a bot)
• TEXT_CHANNEL_MESSAGE — A message template for user for a public channel. Users mention is inside. For example '<@{}> закончил стэндап. Красава!'
• TEXT_NEW_DAY — A welcome message for a new day standup
• SLACK_COMMON_CHANNEL — Channel ID for public standup. Can be easily found when open a channel. Take a look at the url https://teamname.slack.com/messages/*CHANNEL_ID*/details/.

Deploy

Be sure you have AWS_ACCESS_KEY and AWS_SECRET_KEY environment variables set.

Zappa

To deploy a bot with Zappa just write zappa deploy dev. Zappa will create CloudFormation stack for you to manage all the infrastructure. When you need yo update you stack write zappa update dev.

Docker

You need to build Docker image with command docker build -t your_tag_name .. Then run container with command docker run -p 3720:3720 your_tag_name where 3720 is a default port in Docker file. You can change the port for any other. In order to use CRON to start standup, you need some trigger. The easiest solution is to make a simple Lambda function that will trigger bot's API. Take a look at scheduler.py file. You can use alternative schedulers but for Lambda you need to

1. Create a file local.yml with content

dev:
  SCHEDULER_URL: your_url

where dev is a name of the environment, SCHEDULER_URL is a URL that sends standup to all users. For current settings, it would look like your_domain:3720/send_standup.

2. Tune CRON settings in serverless.yml file.
3. Deploy Lambda with Serverless framework sls deploy.

Zappa settings

You can tune deploy settings in zappa_settings.json file.

For example, you might want to change you standup start day (our when standup is sent).

Admin interface

The admin interface is available with Django interface. When you've deployed a service with Zappa admin interface will be available by /admin url (without static files). Don't forget to create superuser (python manager.py createsuperuser --settings=slack.settings.dev). Add questions with the order.

You also need to add user for standup. For example, in our team only developers write standups. Just fill Slack id for user and mark Is active. You can find Slack id in the url when open users profile. For example, https://team.slack.com/messages/channel_id/team/USER_ID/. You don't need to fill Channel id for user.