Turn slack-bot-server into a reusable framework

[dblock]

We tell users to fork this project and build on top. There're probably a few things that can be done to turn this into a framework, maybe extract a set of gems.

• slack-bot-service: just the service parts that starts/stops/restarts/manages a set of teams and bots
• slack-bot-store: a set of models that give a team storage
• slack-bot-api: an API for slack button integration and teams
• slack-bot-web: a Web UI and API to register teams

[dominicsayers]

I haven't had time to understand how this is put together yet, but this is just a note to describe my situation as an example use-case.

I have an existing Rails app (with a Postgres db) that defines accounts (analogous to Slack teams) each of which has multiple users. Also a user can belong to multiple accounts (just like Slack itself). An account can store credentials for Slack in the form of an API Key for a bot and we currently use this to let my app post news to a team's Slack channel.

It makes sense to me to have a separate server that listens for Slack messages, so I like the slack-bot-server concept. I'd need it to be able to authenticate with my app and perform CRUD operations based on the messages it receives (I have defined an API for this). I'd also need to be able to define the Slack listener's settings within my app's UI (hopefully the slack-bot-server API can do this and is authenticated).

I'm willing to put some effort into making slack-bot-server work for my needs unless you think I'm barking up the wrong tree.

[dblock]

I think you're barking up the right tree :) maybe a good place to start is to add PostgreSQL support to this project, refactoring storage so it can be either mongodb or PostgreSQL. This will help you understand all the moving parts.

[dblock]

Closing this thanks to @tmsrjs work on the gem.

I've renamed this project to slack-ruby-bot-server, which is consistent with slack-ruby-bot and cut 0.1.0. I will close this issue since now this is a gem, splitting functionality into separate libraries and interfaces are further good problems to have.

Next steps is to make bots like slack-market or slack-amber-alert to use the gem, and continue absorbing functionality here and making new releases.