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)

Summary


In this chapter, we saw how to abstract away the core Slack API methods into a reusable module by using ES6's new class structures. The difference between a reactive and active bot was outlined as well as the distinction between keywords and bot commands. By applying the basic knowledge of external APIs outlined in this chapter, you should be able to create a bot that interfaces with any third-party application that provides RESTful APIs.

In the next chapter, we will learn about the Redis data storage service and how to write a bot that interfaces with a persistent data source.