Book Image

Building Slack Bots

Book Image

Building Slack Bots

Overview of this book

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.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

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 = message.text.toLowerCase...