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)

Submitting your app to the app directory


Once you have tested your integration within your team's channel, and you are happy with your bot, it's time to submit it to the app directory. To do so, first ensure that your application conforms to Slack's checklist for deploying an app (https://api.slack.com/docs/slack-apps-checklist). In short, your app must:

  • Request only those scopes that are actually in use.

  • Display the Add to Slack button on a webpage. You are required to have your own website with instructions and help for new users.

  • Have an appropriate name (for example, no trademark or copyright infringement).

  • Have an app or bot icon that is clear and distinctive.

  • Have a high-quality icon that is at least 512 x 512 pixels in size.

  • Include short and long descriptions of your bot's actions.

  • Include an installation link (this can simply be a webpage displaying the Add to Slack button and a guide on how to use your bot).

  • Feature an customer support link and e-mail, in case users run into problems installing...