Botan the Slack bot

A generic Slack bot built with BotKit.

Configuration

First make sure .env file is configured.

Distributable app

To run this bot as distributable app (single app that can be installed to multiple teams) you'll need to set SLACK_CLIENT_ID and SLACK_CLIENT_SECRET. REDIRECT_URI needs to be set to your apps URL (make sure the path is /install/auth).

When using this methods the app will need to store bot token and channel ID, for this you'll need to set JSONSTORE_URL and JSONSTORE_ENCRYPT_KEY. The data will be stored in a jsonstore.io collection and encrypted using the key.

Single instance

To run this bot as a single team instance you'll only need SLACK_BOT_TOKEN which can be obtained by installing the app from app manager.

Both methods require SLACK_SIGNING_SECRET which is used to verify that your app is sending the requests.

ENCODE_URL base64-encodes URLs sent to Memify service.

AYLIEN_TEXT_API_KEY needs to be set to use summary feature which is using Aylien Text Analysis API. You can subscribe to a generous free tier with RapidAPI.

DEBUG=true will log communication to console to help you understand what's being sent from Slack to the bot.

Development

Check out the repo and run the app in dev mode:

yarn dev

The app will run on PORT defined in .env file. To use this app in Slack you'll need to expose it to the outside world via a tunnel. You can use localtunnel which is provided with the app. Run yarn tunnel. Or ngrok which I find more stable, but the free version doesn't support custom subdomain aliases.

Once the tunnel is set up, go to Slack app configuration and set request URL for different features to point to the tunneled app. Make sure the path is set to /api/messages.

The bot uses interactive components, slash commands and event subscriptions. Also subscribe to Bot events, such as app_mention, message.channels, message.groups etc.

Deployment

This bot has been tested with Glitch which is a great service for small projects like this. You can import from and export directly to GitHub repo and it automatically restarts on changes. It's very easy to play with and devlop this app directly from Glitch.

See Botan's Glitch page.