Re-use the Client for the web server

[klaustopher]

Hey,

I have been playing around with the framework over the weekend and I want to implement a bot that listens to chat but also has some webhooks (i.e. hook it up to GitHub to react to events that happen with our pull-requests). I set it up like you did in the tutorial and everything worked when I stayed within the Slack world ...

But when I wanted to send something to the chat room from the web server I ran into an issue. The client property on the SlackMathbot::Bot is private and I cannot access it from the sinatra app. In #20 and #31 you basically suggest to use Slack::Web::Client.new directly... But since my bot already has a connection to the server open, I don't really see why it should be needed to create another connection to the Slack server.

Am I just missing a way to access the client directly?

[dblock]

In theory I think there's no harm exposing client, outside of the bot, you might want to test it with .send(:client) and if that works feel free to PR a change. You might want to reach into client.web_client if you need the web one that was used to open the connection in the first place.

Also, generally, I'm interested in expanding slack-ruby-bot with support for web hooks and such, maybe merging parts or all of https://github.com/dblock/slack-bot-server or turning the latter into a framework (see slack-ruby/slack-ruby-bot-server#3).

[klaustopher]

Ok, good, I thought I was really missing something when looking at the code. The "hack" with send(:client) is what I ended up doing, but it felt so ugly that I had to wash my hands after writing this code 😂

I'll take a look at the referenced issues. I think there's something missing between "Running a bot that only replies to chat" and "Running a full slack integration available to others" ;)

[dblock]

@klaustopher I think https://github.com/dblock/slack-ruby-bot-server is the beginning of the answer for the missing link.

[klaustopher]

@dblock Thanks, this looks good. I'll definitely take a look ;)

[dblock]

This is related to https://github.com/dblock/slack-ruby-bot-server/issues/6.

I think we should either expose client as is, or delegate calls to it. Thoughts? PRs?

[CanisHelix]

Has there been any progress on exposing client? I have a bot running very nicely, but I'd like the ability to have the bot message users after a specific rails api call too. I'm not familiar with the send(:client) hack mentioned above, could someone elaborate a bit?

[kstole]

This issue seems to revolve around the same discussion as supporting slash commands and webhooks.

I'm also extremely interested in this and I ran into the same issues as @klaustopher. I was previously using Lita, which includes a built-in web server, but this library is much nicer for working with Slack so it would be nice if it could also include a web server.

I'm not a Ruby expert. @dblock do you think it makes more sense to look into slack-ruby-bot-server or to try the hacky .send(:client)? @klaustopher do you have any sample code you could share for your .send(:client) solution?

[dblock]

See my comment above for client, but generally I would like native webhook support in slack-ruby-bot-server.

[dblock]

Slash commands and webhooks require a web server. I've released https://github.com/slack-ruby/slack-ruby-bot-server-events that has full support for those.