slack-pagerduty-goalie-bot

This bot will set the Topic in a Slack channel with the name of the on-call engineer for your PagerDuty escalation policy.

Setting the necessary Environment Variables

Check out the .env.EXAMPLE file for the values you need to set as Environment Variables in the process that will execute this job.

This will vary depending on the method you use to run this script.

The SLACK_TOKEN value here is what Slack calls a Legacy Token and for me runs as a user, not a bot. This is because the APIs I'm trying to use - setting Channel topic and managing a User Group called "Goalie" are API calls a bot cannot make but a user can. Slack is working to address this gap with Workspace Tokens, but Workspaces Tokens do not (as of Feb 2018) work with Enterprise Grid accounts and that is what I use at work.

Running the app locally

Since this is a Node.js application first and foremost, ensure you have node installed and in your $PATH.

• Checkout this repo
• cd slack-pagerduty-goalie-bot
• npm install to download all the libraries used by this app
• cp .env.EXAMPLE .env and change the default vaules to your own API keys, etc
• npm start it will run and update the Topic in the Slack room
• Done
• Run npm start again in the future when your On Call Engineer has changed.

Running the app as an AWS Lambda without Terraform (aka for development purposes)

• Checkout this repo
• cd slack-pagerduty-goalie-bot
• cp .env.EXAMPLE .env and change the default vaules to your own API keys, etc
• Ensure you have your AWS keys set
• You need to create a slack-pagerduty-goalie-bot-lambda Lambda function according to your style of managing AWS resources.
• make lambda it will make a zip of the app and node_modules and update an existing Lambda function named slack-pagerduty-goalie-bot-lambda
• Now you can run this Lambda function when you want to update your Slack room with the current on-call engineer.

TODO: Automating the running on this bot

• Manage a Slack user group alias called "Goalie" so users on your team can ask for help by asking @goalie a question.
• I am expecting to run this as a Lambda function, but it could also just be a Jenkins job. It could change significantly depending on the requirements to run in those environments. So far this just works in my terminal.
• There is no persistence to know if the On Call Engineer has changed. So running this every five minutes will basically spam your Slack channel.
• Schedule your running of the process based on when the average shift change occurs for your team.
• Make this an actual "bot" that could respond to the question "Who is on call?"