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Building Slack Bots
Building Slack Bots

Building Slack Bots: Create powerful, useful, fast, and fun chat bots that make Slack better

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Building Slack Bots

Chapter 2. Your First Bot

Readers will be amazed at how few lines of code are required to get a basic bot up and running in their Slack environment. This chapter will walk the reader through the basics of building a Slack bot:

  • Preparing your environment
  • Creating a Slack API token
  • Connecting your bot
  • Joining a channel
  • Sending a message to a channel
  • Basic responses
  • Sending a direct message
  • Restricting access
  • Debugging your bot

Although some of the concepts first outlined will be known to a more advanced reader, it is still recommended to read through the first few sections of this chapter to ensure that your environment is up and ready to go.

In this chapter, we will build a bot that performs the following actions:

  • Connects to your Slack team
  • Says hello to all the members of a channel after successfully connecting, distinguishing between real users and bot users
  • Responds to users saying hello
  • Sends a direct message to users who ask for the total amount of time the bot has been running (also known...

Preparing your environment

Before we can get started with the first bot, the programming environment must be set up and configured to run Node.js applications and packages. Let's start at the very beginning with Node.

In brief, Node.js (also referred to as Node) is a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome's v8 JavaScript Engine. In practice, this means that JavaScript can be run outside of the usual browser environment, making JavaScript both a frontend and backend language.

Google Chrome's v8 JavaScript engine ensures that your JavaScript code runs fast and efficiently. Unlike in the world of browsers (and excepting Node versions), Node is maintained by a single open source foundation with hundreds of volunteer developers. This makes developing for Node much simpler than for browsers as you will not run into problems with varying JavaScript implementations across platforms.

In this book, we will be using major Version 5 (any version starting with 5) of Node. This allows us to...

Basic responses

The Slack API can be configured to execute methods once certain events are dispatched, as seen earlier with the RTM_CONNECTION_OPENED event. Now, we will dive into other useful events provided to us.

The authenticated event

So far, we have seen how to add functionality to Slack's RTM_CONNECTION_OPENED event triggered by the bot entering a channel and an error occurring, respectively. If you wish to execute some code when a bot logs in but before it connects to a channel, you can use the AUTHENTICATED event:

slack.on(CLIENT_EVENTS.RTM.AUTHENTICATED, (rtmStartData) => {
  console.log(`Logged in as ${rtmStartData.self.name} of team ${rtmStartData.team.name}, but not yet connected to a channel`);
});

This gives the following output:

[Mon Jan 18 2016 21:37:24 GMT-0500 (EST)] INFO Connecting...
Logged in as awesomebot of team Building Bots, but not yet connected to a channel

Now, we will introduce the message event.

Using the message event

The message event will trigger every...

Sending a direct message

A direct message (DM) channel is a channel that only operates between two users. By design, it cannot have more or less than two users and is meant for private communication. Sending a DM is remarkably similar to sending a message to a channel, as the dm object is almost identical to the channel object.

Consider the following snippet:

slack.on(RTM_EVENTS.MESSAGE, (message) => {
  let user = slack.dataStore.getUserById(message.user)

  if (user && user.is_bot) {
    return;
  }

  let channel = slack.dataStore.getChannelGroupOrDMById(message.channel);

  if (message.text) {
    let msg = message.text.toLowerCase();

    if (/uptime/g.test(msg)) {
      let dm = slack.dataStore.getDMByName(user.name);

      let uptime = process.uptime();

      // get the uptime in hours, minutes and seconds
      let minutes = parseInt(uptime / 60, 10),
          hours = parseInt(minutes / 60, 10),
          seconds = parseInt(uptime - (minutes * 60) - ((hours * 60) *...

Restricting access

Occasionally, you might wish to restrict bot commands to administrators of your Slack team. A good example is a bot that controls a project's deploy process. This can be immensely powerful but perhaps not something that you want every user to have access to. Only administrators (also known as admins) should have the authority to access such functions. Admins are special users who have administrative powers over the Slack team. Luckily, restricting such access is easy with the is_admin property attached to a user object.

In the following example, we'll restrict the uptime command demonstrated in the previous topic to admin users, notifying the restricted user that they can't use that command:

slack.on(RTM_EVENTS.MESSAGE, (message) => {
  let user = slack.dataStore.getUserById(message.user)

  if (user && user.is_bot) {
    return;
  }

  let channel = slack.dataStore.getChannelGroupOrDMById(message.channel);

  if (message.text) {
    let msg =...

Debugging a bot

It is inevitable that eventually you will encounter a bug in your bot that is difficult to squash. The worst are bugs that don't cause your program to crash and thus don't provide a useful stack trace and line number for where the crash happened. For most issues, the console.log() method will be enough to help you track down the bug, for the more tenacious bugs however we will need a true debugging environment. This section will introduce you to iron-node (https://s-a.github.io/iron-node/), a cross-platform JavaScript debugging environment based on Chrome's dev tools.

Start by installing iron-node:

npm install -g iron-node

Note again the use of the -g flag, which installs the application globally.

Before we can start debugging, we need to add a breakpoint to our code, which tells the debugger to stop the code and allow for deeper inspection. Add the debugger statement to our previous code, within the slack.openDM() code block:

if (/uptime/g.test(msg)) {
  debugger...

Preparing your environment


Before we can get started with the first bot, the programming environment must be set up and configured to run Node.js applications and packages. Let's start at the very beginning with Node.

In brief, Node.js (also referred to as Node) is a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome's v8 JavaScript Engine. In practice, this means that JavaScript can be run outside of the usual browser environment, making JavaScript both a frontend and backend language.

Google Chrome's v8 JavaScript engine ensures that your JavaScript code runs fast and efficiently. Unlike in the world of browsers (and excepting Node versions), Node is maintained by a single open source foundation with hundreds of volunteer developers. This makes developing for Node much simpler than for browsers as you will not run into problems with varying JavaScript implementations across platforms.

In this book, we will be using major Version 5 (any version starting with 5) of Node. This allows us to use the newly implemented...

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Key benefits

  • This is the first developer's guide to programming for Slack
  • It covers everything you need to create chat bots for Slack’s conversational UI
  • It’s full of realistic examples, usable code, and lucid explanations on everything you need to know

Description

Slack promises that its users will "be less busy." Slack bots interact with users in Slack chatrooms, providing useful immediate information, and automating work. This book gives you everything you need to build powerful and useful Slack bots. You’ll see how to hook into the Slack API to create software that can read and post to chatrooms, respond to commands and hints given in natural conversational language, and build fun and useful bots for your own place of work, both as a front end to your own service and to distribute and share as apps. You can even sell your bots and build a business as a Slack bot developer. Throughout the book, you’ll build useful and fun example applications that you can modify for your own situations. These range from simple, fun applications to liven up discussions to useful, data-driven apps to help you make decisions quickly and manage work.

Who is this book for?

This is a book for software developers who want to build Slack bots for their own company’s use or for customers. You need to know JavaScript.

What you will learn

  • Receive and send messages sent in Slack
  • Respond to user commands
  • Process natural language
  • Perform useful tasks on commands such as fetching data from external sources
  • Use webhooks and slash commands

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Table of Contents

8 Chapters
1. Getting Started with Slack Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. Your First Bot Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. Adding Complexity Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. Using Data Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. Understanding and Responding to Natural Language Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. Webhooks and Slash Commands Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
7. Publishing Your App Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 3
(2 Ratings)
5 star 50%
4 star 0%
3 star 0%
2 star 0%
1 star 50%
DAVID Jan 12, 2017
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
It is well written and has clearly been proof-read and edited, and is well produced. Interesting examples are well explained. It is a good start to bots in general and Slack bots in particular.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Kumar Kashyap Dec 11, 2019
Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 1
Don't buy it, they do not update the content and code to newer versions of Slack API. They don't even respond to Github PRs and Issues.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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